Everything Wrong With The Passion Translation in Colossians

let me tell you why this matters so much to me and why i've hired a number of highly respected scholars to review the passion translation and then made their work their papers and their interviews available for free online the passion translation is a bad translation it is not even proper to call it a translation it has more issues than i can count it pushes sectarian theology and puts ideas into the bible that just aren't there to start with it's primarily the work of one man a guy named brian simmons who doesn't seem to have the proper education or skills to be able to translate the entire bible well but brian simmons claims that god has supernaturally given him the spirit of revelation and given him secrets of hebrew and greek that he has put into his passion bible now normally weird and bad translations don't really make it into your shelf at home or into the bookstores or certainly aren't recommended from pulpits normally but because of the reckless and unwise endorsing of the passion translation by some high-profile hyper-charismatic pastors that's exactly what's happening i thought something has to be done about this so i made a number of videos exposing the passion translation trying to share why i think this is a bad translation even though i like the esv and the nasb and the new king james version i like the king james version i mean i like most of the available translations we have nowadays but no not this one still even with the videos and the reviews i had done some people questioned my motives or some people wondered if maybe it's kind of like a mike winger versus brian simmons you know who do i believe situation so i hired a bunch of scholars to review the passion translation and present their work to you so you could have an academic and as unbiased as possible review of the work that is what i've called my passion project and this is i honestly this is one of the best videos we're gonna have in the passion project alex hewittson has written probably one of the best papers we've had so far it's so accessible and it really breaks things down in a way that i think everyone can totally comprehend and follow alex gives lots of good examples and he backs this up with research and footnotes that you can check for yourself now most the scholars i've hired have been really sort of well-known and highly respected people who have a long list of scholarly works behind them in their cv but alex is actually a student still he's getting his masters of divinity at westminster seminary here in california alex's work is solid but since he doesn't have the same credentials that pretty much everybody has had who's been part of this project we've asked dr brad bittner to peer review alex's work and then to join in on the interview which you're about to watch dr brad bitter is the associate professor of new testament at westminster seminary in california he has his phd in new testament and early christianity you can actually look at his academia page down below where you can find some of his work i've got tons of links down there you're going to want to check out i think that alex's work being the work of a student still reviewed by a legitimate scholar is evidence that even a student who's careful and thoughtful in their work can easily disprove the claims being made by brian simmons about the passion translation the church needs to be warned about this wildly popular and very wildly weird bible translation in my opinion this is a fraud that has been perpetrated on the people of god and it's making one man very rich and famous while changing god's word so much that it's becoming the word of brian simmons but i'm not just gonna make claims here my passion project is meant to prove it and there's links below to all of the interviews and all of the papers that we've done in the passion project including the paper that we're about to look at right now written by alex hewitson and peer review by dr brad bittner it's available for free in a link below also there's timestamps you should see chapters on this video and timestamps in the description and in the first comment the goal of that is to help you just kind of navigate to the things that you find most important and most relevant for your understanding and i personally ask that if you're interested in this project and what i'm doing and you want to help me spread the word that you consider liking and sharing out this video to other people so that we can get information out there about this translation and its many many problems alex me and you go back a little bit a little ways and uh dr bittner you've recently jumped on to do the peer reviewing of all the work that alex has done trying to review the passion translation and i just want to thank both of you so much like sincerely sincerely thank you for being part of this project it's something i care a lot about and i think i know alex cares a lot about it i think dr bittner you you're the back and forth we've had exhibits that you also have a heart not just about this translation but about the people uh who are being influenced by the word of god as it goes out and so let's just start at the beginning um why did you guys agree to do this project what do you see as the most important reason to be part of it well mike you know we've been in touch for a while now i i where i come from in south africa i've been exposed to the translate the passion translation a bit and so i just getting an understanding of how wide reaching the effects have been globally speaking and my love and passion for god's word i just really felt that it was important to be part of something that would look after guardians and integrity yeah i feel like you're echoing my my whole reason for doing the ridiculous amount of work it is to get all these all these people together and do all the reviews of the passion translation so thank you and uh dr bittner what got you involved it's really down to alex um alex came to me he's in my pastoral sorry my pauline epistles class so alex is part of the pauline epistles class this semester and uh of course in in that we are working our way through and got to a book like colossians and early on you saw that coming and so stopped in and asked me if i'd heard about this passion translation i hadn't by name as it turned out but as he described what it was to me i realized that i had talked to some people who had been influenced by it in the past and realized that if i had known about it i would have been able to help them in in better ways so i'm i also am passionate about getting good translations of god's powerful word in people's hands and helping them to be able to discern what's good and what's less good yeah well amen that's that's exactly why this project's happening is because so many people it's like that in this it's as though in a scholarly world the passion translation flew under the radar for the most part but it's wildly popular amongst certain i would say hyper charismatic groups in particular where it's just flying off the shelves millions and millions of copies so far and it's ramping up it seems so um at least facebook keeps trying to sell me more more of the same ones so what was your approach alex to uh to reviewing colossians in the passion translation so my my thought was let me translate colossians from scratch uh not not for publication as as a sold bible but just for the purposes of the review so i worked through uh every verse the whole of the book working through and then and taking notes on major grammatical features certain theological themes and power and comparing it to what simmons did in his translation and then aggregating all that data and that's what you'll be able to see in the paper that you'll put up is there's just a condensation of all of those observations and i really thought the way the best way to do it would translate the whole thing yeah and i want the audience to know that um what what alex has done is probably put more time into his paper than anybody else has not that's a a brag on alex more than anything else it's not a slight other guys did the job but alex actually made his own translation of the entire book of colossians just as a tool for his own research and his use of uh of going through the passion translation so i'm grateful for that i i think the end result is this is probably the most functionally useful of all the papers we've had in the passion project so far i think it's really going to just connect with people and really make things obvious to them that need to be obvious because i'm making wild claims okay i'm saying things brian simmons is making wild claims brian simmons is saying things he's claiming that god spoke to him that god gave him special supernatural revelation secrets of hebrew and greek he's unlocking the bible for us and special in new ways it's going to bring revival it wasn't a dream it was a wonderful encounter that i had two in the morning and upstairs bedroom where the one i love came and and gave me this commission to do the translation process he breathed on me so that i would do the project and i felt downloads coming instantly i received downloads it was like i got a chip put inside of me i got a connection inside of me to hear him better to understand the scriptures better and hopefully to translate he promised that he would give me new understanding and new fresh revelation from his word and immediately he gave me a download immediately i began to receive a supernatural download of insight and revelation that has continued to this day i had a visitation and i was given the commission by the lord as he breathed on me and released me and called me to translate the bible i discovered and uncovered so many mysteries and glory realms in the book of psalms it will take your breath away i believe god gave me the key to the book of proverbs the lord showed me it's the homonymic structure of hebrew is going to be the key to understanding revelation in the last days including the book of revelation which you haven't got yet honestly i'm mega understating it god really helped me do this translation he promised that he would uh give me secrets that had not been disclosed the secrets of the lord he's beginning to share them with me and i'd like to share them with you i've made some discoveries i don't know who to talk to i mean i'm finding out all the secrets and translating every time i open the bible i get fresh insight i it speaks to me it goes beyond the mind i i get dreams and and revelation from from the lord that is clear and prophetic so i think sid i believe i got baptized in the spirit of revelation in that library room of heaven and he's revealing himself in this hour like never before the word of god is coming alive to us it's like we're getting a brand new bible isn't it and i'm suggesting that these things aren't true and what the work you're doing is putting uh the scholarship and putting the facts and the data and the evidence behind all of these things and i just i'm really grateful for that so um to get some perspective though on how we should look at the passion translation overall for those who want to hear an informed view on this can you briefly explain the different types of translation varieties that exist currently in the church sure i can speak to that um we are really blessed in our day and age to have lots of great options out there in english translation and across other languages but most of those would fall on a spectrum so you've got on the one end uh very literal translations and on the other end what really aren't translations anymore they would be called paraphrases almost deserve to be called commentary and some people might have heard uh for example that the new international version falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum as a dynamic equivalent translation that is they're looking at the words in the original languages but trying to bring the sense across not just word for word or phrase for phrase but in a way that maybe uses some of the idioms the ways of everyday speaking in the in the target language and another translation maybe like the esb which some people use would be slightly more literal the nasb very very literal because they're taking it word for word and leaving the interpretation then up to the reader and the one who's doing some bible study rather than doing that interpretation for the reader so okay on that on that spectrum on this sort of sort of like and you could view it as a spectrum you could kind of like label translations and put them in different sort of places approximately on a spectrum there where would you put the passion translation so people can understand what kind of thing we're dealing with here yeah i think i think it's a misnomer to be honest to call it a translation it's uh we'll get into this perhaps with alex's good work on colossians but it's it's all the way to this end of a paraphrase so something like the message which has been helpful to a lot of people in recent decades is a paraphrase but i think the passion translation goes even beyond that at many points and it's really a commentary on the text rather than translation in several places that has been something i've heard consistently from almost everyone who works in the project they go this isn't this isn't a translation uh one scholar did his first draft review of the of the work and i had to message him back and say you uh you you did the review of a paraphrase but he says it's a translation and in his work he's going on to say look it's not only is it not a translation it's not even properly a paraphrase you have to you have to sort of add extra extra words it's it's interpretive or i think it was tremper longman who said it was a highly highly highly interpretive paraphrase that it's uh like a targum was what he related it to would you agree with that assessment absolutely i think that's right in some ways i wish i wish brian simmons had had reserved a lot of what he put in the so-called translation for marginal notes you know if you wanted to have a study bible for instance with some commentary or some notes in the margins at the bottom of the page i think that would have been a much more appropriate way to go rather than calling the translation and acting as though these are the words in the original text yeah now help our our audience anybody who might be watching who's going to look at this review and they don't really know you gentlemen and they're like thinking so are these guys just critical of lots of translations like is that their goal is just to tear down the word of god like where are you coming from here what's your attitude towards translations even paraphrases in general i'm saying i we we're coming at this from the angle of people who have a tremendous love for the word of god and i i want to i'm very very careful to ever say anything publicly in criticism of translations because most of our good english translations are done by teams of really large teams of truly excellent scholars across the world different cultures different backgrounds and training but all highly qualified and they and they dedicate years and years and years of careful study that they bring to the table to make these translations and so the act of translating itself is a real challenge and so these people have thought very carefully about translation for decades have done so for a reason and so we don't want to undermine people's confidence in the word of god in any way the english translations that we have are highly reliable really good quality we of course may have some differences here and there about how we might approach things but that's not the same as saying we're critical of other translations as uh dr bernardi said this isn't really a translation which is why it deserves the level of criticism that i think it should yeah thank you for making that clear and so in agreement with that my own studies into translations i you know i was raised up in sort of a king james only ish kind of influenced environment and when i started doing my own real work on this and study on this i was relieved to find out we have so many good and faithful translations and then i could pick up the esv and the nasb and i could i could i could read the niv even believe it or not and um and to know that all these are i would consider these generally reliable good translations and yeah the passion translation is in a different category altogether and it's encouraging for people to realize that this is not undermining anything except for just sharpening our ability to just hone in on good translations and discern them from other things and so the passion of translation though um it claims things you know the publisher's website brian simmons he goes around claiming lots of things about the translation and one of the things that they claim as far as translation strategy and i'll quote it now this is their claim they say the pastor translation's philosophy is that the meaning of god's original message to the world has priority over its exact form which is why our goal is to communicate the meaning of scripture as clearly and naturally as possible in modern english brian and other reviewers have sought to remain faithful to the original biblical languages by preserving their literal meaning yet flexible enough to convey god's original message in a way a modern english in the way modern english speakers can understand it's a balanced translation that tries to hold both the words literal meaning and original message in proper tension resulting in an entirely new fiery fresh translation of god's word now that those seem in your paper you say these are kind of standard for the most part standard types of aims and goals but your statement in your paper is simmons does not adhere to the stated translation strategy could you explain that yeah i think what you see if that was the case is his translation might have some differences in different expressions that he uses and so on but the overall product would be comparable to other english translations right if he was really following through on what he's talking about but his translation is so radically different from all the other work that's been done by scholars over centuries and the last couple of decades in particular producing a lot of our version that really shows you that what he's doing isn't translated and i think another way you could think about this is if we took let's say the esb and the niv and the nasb and some others and we translated it back into greek like we did that as a project right and compared those there would be some there would be differences but you'd be able to get a sense of the real similarity in the end result if you took the passion translation simeon's work and translated that back into greek and then compared those two translations of greek they would be unrecognizable for the most part and that just shows you that what he's doing isn't really translating at all yeah yeah wow so i like that analogy i think it's something i can grab onto real easy yeah when you you go from greek into english well when you go from that same english back into greek and it's completely different than the greek you started with something happened along the way that wasn't wasn't a good idea so simmons has made some really big claims um and we're going to talk a little bit here now about these claims the publisher makes open public claims that they've made he's made claims about the source text of his translation some of these claims now these claims i think go right over the head of average people uh not because people are unintelligent they're intelligent they're just not experienced with this area and so he likes to say that he's getting out these like important source texts he'll call them the aramaic he's getting the aramaic we're also incorporating some aramaic which is always like it befuddles the scholars why i've done this 90 of the biblical problems you have with understanding the text of the bible 90 of them disappear with the aramaic text now as you're going back to as you said the aramaic and the greek that way did you have concern that there may be some scholars who look at this and and may not agree with the basic premise but we're bridging the aramaic text with the greek text it's going to be eye-popping it's going to look different feel different sound different and i i welcome and anticipate a lot of scholars bringing their review and bringing their comments to us his footnotes are just chock full in fact in colossians 23 times he references the aramaic in just four chapters of colossians in his footnotes 23 times can you walk us through this issue can you explain like what is going on with his claims about aramaic um what is it he's claiming about the source texts and then this is what in your paper you say is quote one of the most problematic areas of simmons translation i think that's exactly right if i can jump in maybe alex want to clarify but and just to be clear i i you read earlier the the aims of translation committee so-called in publishing this and i resonate with so many of those we want to have the bible in people's hands we want to have god's word as accurately and understandably as possible going out to as many people as possible but to to call this a translation and then to claim further that you're working on the basis of obscure and um in some ways uh hidden texts that people haven't seen before just isn't the case and so when when alex first put this in front of me and uh and i looked at colossians as an example and how many times as you say he he says he's working for the aramaic text i i had to just stop and ask myself what's he talking about i don't i don't even know what he's talking about yeah now you're not alone in that i just want the listeners to know what dr bittner says i got from scholar after scholar i think it was um dr blomberg who reached out to me and and just said i'm not able to write this review yet when he says aramaic what is he even talking about like i don't know what he means when he says aramaic texts and it's because the claims that he's making were so strange and novel to the guys who'd actually do this kind of work that that should raise alarms to all of us so uh let me just really quick to lay this out for our listeners the brian simmons in the passion translation claims that he's getting new insights into the word of god and he's doing it through finding aramaic texts and he says jesus spoke aramaic the apostle spoke aramaic and he even claims and i'll ask you about this in a minute he even claims that scholarship has recently discovered that all or almost all of our new testament was originally written in aramaic and it's causing them to run to the dusty corners of their libraries to pull out the aramaic texts but what what you're saying is there is no aramaic text is that right well if i want to be and i do want to be as charitable as possible i think what he's talking about when he says aramaic are syriac texts so syriac is an ancient language that is also known as eastern aramaic sometimes or middle aramaic and you do have some syriac translations of the new testament which date from the second through to the seventh centuries i just want to emphasize that these are not texts which predate or which are better quality than the greek manuscripts that we have but they've been known of for quite a while and there are people who specialize in syriac texts and textual criticism which is just the scholarly way of talking about how do we take all the ancient evidence and put it together so that we've got the best possible most original text that we can have to work from when we translate into english so i think that maybe is what he's referring to but even so uh that it's not as if there exists uh for colossians say our topic today uh an aramaic translation of colossians that i can pull off of any dusty shelf in this in this room it just isn't there so uh so i i i'm afraid i can't get around the fact that he seems to be making this up and it it it there can i say two things about that sorry one is one one is more pastoral i spent some time as a pastor when i first finished seminary and i'll start with the pastoral comment uh i there was a woman who came up to me when i was when i had a a job as a shopkeeper several years back and i had already done some study of the new testament i'd already learned grief in hebrew and she knew that and she knew that i i loved the lord jesus christ and i wanted to see people understanding god's word and understand the gospel and so she asked me had i heard about these new aramaic texts which were providing us with a new translation and she didn't share any names with me and at the time i wasn't aware of this passion translation but i'm almost certain this is what she was talking about uh and uh and and i said to her i i don't think you're getting good information because that's just not out there i've done a lot of work with ancient documents and this sounds really suspicious to me and and yet she was so enticed by it that she was listening to everything she was being told by people who were touting this as god's word most clearly communicated to her and and that really bothered me as as a former pastor because i knew there were things that she was telling me i didn't know the source text was the passion translation but i knew there were things she was telling me that were wrong so i you can tell i'm a little bit animated about this because i think it really affects people negatively yeah we sorry from a scholarly standpoint and once you call yourself a translation or translation committee with reviewers uh although although you may be a brother or sister in christ and i want to i want to respect you and show you love and be as generous as i can eventually the realm of scholarly discussion or scholarly debate at that point and and so all of our claims as scholars about the text or manuscripts are are and should be subject to very tight academic scrutiny and as we look at this from a scholarly perspective there's nothing there's nothing behind the curtain there's i'm afraid you pull the curtain back and there's just nothing there so i'm left with this impression that when when brian simmons wants to expansively comment on the biblical text it seems as though those points he's he's claiming he has an aramaic original which might be a syriac original but i have not been able to find any of those yeah and when you say syriac original like if you know please correct i'm going to put this in my own words you're not saying i don't think you're not saying we have some sort of original writing from the apostles that was in syriac rather the new testament writings were translated into a language sort of similar to jesus's language but different not quite jesus is aramaic but a different language or a similar language it's a syriac aramaic type thing and that's from the greek over to a different language and he's treating it as though it were the original so that he can kind of get like a more authentic reading of the bible at least that's the impression normal people get oh he's he's getting the real truth like we're getting the real reading from jesus so let me be i'll try to be really crystal clear that's exactly what i'm trying to say is that even if there are syriac texts uh which he's calling arabic those are much later texts than the new testament they're translations and an expert like pete williams who is at cambridge in tindle house has written about this and says there's a trajectory whereby the earlier the syriac translation actually the less the less good quality it is they become more literal over time in general so that if you have a 7th century text as a translation into syriac it's going to be a little bit more faithful but that might mean as you can see that we've got late quite late texts which are translations of the greek original text that we're now somehow magically calling original and and if i could just add one more note to argue or to act as though it's it's um it's just a fact that jesus spoke aramaic and these texts would have originally been in aramaic or translated from aramaic that's also not that's not a um a straightforward claim to me jesus did not speak greek he spoke aramaic galilean aramaic so i i'm someone who works a lot with ancient inscriptions and we've got a wonderful set of new inscriptions from judea from palestine from from the whole region where jesus and the disciples were living at the same time frame that have just come out in the last 15 years and more than anything this has shown us how multilingual israel was in the first century and most new testaments followed all new testament scholars will tell you that nothing was written in aramaic that we have access to everything was written in greek and it was probably first written in greek and jesus was probably also one who knew and spoke greek yes he probably had aramaic maybe he had hebrew as well but we've got all kinds of mounting evidence for the multilingual environment of first century galilee and judea so i just want to make sure that people are aware of this so that when they hear someone claim no it must have been arabic and now we've got these texts there's there are several problems at each step in that argument so this is all my alarm bells go off with this because i mean i have footage and i'll play it some part in our clip here i'll play it for the people to hear where brian says that scholarship has recently uncovered this wonderful fact that the original new testament documents were almost all written in aramaic and he acts as though like the scholarly world just had an aramaic bomb dropped on it and they're all sort of experiencing the aftershock of it and this is the kind of stuff he'll claim in front of an audience that has no knowledge of these types of things all of our bible commentaries and our understanding of the new testament is based on what is called greek primacy which is that the original manuscripts original autographs of the new testament were all written in greek guess what's happened in the last five years this is really new brand new scholarship just like they've discovered things archaeologically that are astounding they have discovered and i've i've read the scholarly uh reports hundreds and hundreds of examples where it's been proven that the greek manuscripts are second-gen copies of the original aramaic new testament that virtually all of the new testament there could be some exceptions but virtually all of the new testament was originally in aramaic and then copied into greek this causes all the scholars to free down and go back to the trash can into the dusty corners of their libraries and pull out all the greek men or all the aramaic manuscripts and realized that they had thrown away the originals and this sets him up as kind of it's it seems like a scholarly snake oil type thing that's going on here i i and i'm not trying to put those words in your mouth i tend to have stronger words than most scholars do because everybody's always very careful with their terms and i'm i'm just clumsy sometimes sometimes on purpose um because i just want to make sure it's clear i just want to make sure it's clear that this is this is not accurate so can you respond to that just real quick um is it in fact not true that scholars have recently shifted and all decided that the aramaic is probably the original behind most of the new testament it's just not true in fact it's bonkers to say that so if that's clear enough it's actually clear and it you know there as with anything there are there are strands of truth in what he's saying and that in the middle of the 20th century there were debates about especially with relation to the gospels would we have we would be able to work backwards from the greek text that we have to a reconstructed aramaic text which might have represented the spoken aramaic that jesus might have been using but that has not been in any in any way shape or form the dominant conclusion of new testament scholarship and there have been no epic bombshells dropped in the last several decades okay because this is yeah that's really central to every time you see the word aramaic in his translation it seems like this is connected to this type of claim he uh he even has like in many of the places he goes and speaks he says that jesus's last word on the cross wasn't to telesty uh he didn't it wasn't to tell us die in the greek he didn't say that he said an aramaic word and the aramaic word has a double meaning because you know he likes to double triple translate things so he says in many many occasions i've seen him say probably six different places in large gatherings that what tetelestai actually means is it's a double meaning and it also means bride and so his final word on the cross was to yell out bride this will change your life i mean this you'll never forget this never long as you live you will never forget what i'm going to say in the next two minutes absolutely change you forever have i got your attention and that's not american hype the last word jesus spoke on the cross he did not speak in greek what is the last word jesus spoke on the cross you've heard me say this haven't you okay you know what's coming sweetheart oh this does it change your life oh this this will i just got an email on my i could show you my phone uh women's prison is being revivals hitting a women's prison because of what i'm about to share with you the last word jesus spoke on the cross he spoke in aramaic the language of jesus was not greek he spoke aramaic i'm not going to make the point you're going to have to search it out and you you come to your own conclusion but jesus taught the lord's prayer sermon on the mount the teachings of jesus were all in aramaic not greek all right so the last word jesus spoke a dying man is going to speak from his heart his heart language i speak a number of languages but when i want to speak to my wife or i share my heart it's english jesus spoke aramaic the last word on the cross was kala kala kala is an aramaic homonym which means finished but what if for 2000 years the church has been robbed of what jesus really said his dying breath kala if i ask any hebrew speaker even to this very day aramaic and hebrew linguistically linked it's the same in aramaic or hebrew the word kala do you want to know what it means are you sitting down it's the hebrew word bride bride then he gave birth to her because from his side came blood and water mom blood and water he gave birth and he always tells the crowds the same thing he goes when i tell you this it's going to change your life you'll never be the same and i was the same after i heard it but i thought but i thought it was that kind of thing that it's like what's going on here this isn't responsible to the word of god or the people of god or or or to the words of christ it just seems not to be not at all and i i think you know i i would i would try again to be generous and think how many how many sermons have i preached or have i heard where i might have said something which is helpful and maybe even in terms of the whole bible the right doctrine but not what this text was actually communicating and i think that's what's going on there you know of course the church is the bride of christ in the new testament but to argue that catalyst i in any way gets us there is is not just false linguistically false according to the manuscript tradition it's also really damaging because you're suggesting to people that the word of god that we do have that god has given by his holy spirit through these human authors who wrote in greek and he preserved this in his wonderfully kind providence for us in the manuscript tradition that that's not actually the word of god and that only if i'm touched by god himself and have access to something nobody else can see can i tell you what god means at that point you become a renegade prophet and i think that's really dangerous but what if for 2000 years the church has been robbed of uh what jesus really said all right let's continue on the aramaic path just for a second i'm very grateful for all the things you're sharing you're echoing what's in my heart for sure so um uh one of the things that brian simmons likes to claim is that aramaic in part of this whole like sort of gnostic kind of secret secret knowledge thing that he kind of leans on that aramaic is like the love language of god and and the aramaic and the hebrew it's in this you get god's love language and so the implication is that when we when we read translations unlike the passion who aren't leaning heavily on the aramaic everywhere that they're missing out on some very valuable elements of god's love and the passion is given the name of the of the translation is restoring this but isn't it by its root a very love-filled language that's very emotional oh you know hebrew is pure emotion the poetic language of hebrew and aramaic release something inside of us it's it's divine it is full of revelation there's flavor it's not it's like thinking with your heart it's like heart level to heart level spirit to spirit deep calling out to deep the romantic poetic heart-filled words of god will fill you with new passion and god's revival fire you will get to know god on a deeper and more intimate level the very words in this translation will go right past the defenses in your mind and right into your spirit the word of god will become so alive in you and you will have a supernatural encounter with the glory and presence of god is that true is aramaic an inherently more loving language is it like god's selective love language so this is one of the things that uh it really has been a problem for me in reading this is it's a it's i i see it as a really truly great offense against god and in a in effect a kind of blasphemy against god to say that he that if effectively it collapses all his attributes all that he is into one thing but the scriptures testify as a whole to many facets of god and i i just wonder what simmons would do with uh texts where there is judgment being levied or god's hatred of sin is being expressed is this all love language or is is god is god loving but is he also holy and is he also just now i know simmons will want to affirm those things so i'm not trying to misrepresent him here but i'm saying his claim about being a love language is incompatible with all the information that we have about how this uh language languages work and the the claim that aramaic is recovering a love language and the secret heart of god i think i've mentioned you before it's somewhat similar to a lot of the gnostic texts that we have in the in the first centuries where um especially second century you've got texts uh coming up that will say things like this is the secret message from so-and-so or the secret knowledge about excellence it and that's what essentially seems to be claiming is that you need to get behind what you've got written in front of you to the real meaning and that it teaches us something about god that was hidden and i think again that is in a way is a blasphemy against the holy spirit because we want to affirm that for the last several thousand years we have had as like the bible just said we have had the word of god with us and we've had all that that we need to know for life and godliness for uh what god is like what man is like the nature of sin the salvation that comes to us in christ that we have had that it hasn't been missing for two thousand years it was given to us uh through the apostles by the holy spirit in the scriptures so i really find that as a as a christian somebody who loves god's word and wants to honor god for who he is and the work of the holy spirit i find it offensive and frankly blasphemous well your paper is organized really well um it's it's organized sort of with uh rather than a verse structure going in order through colossians you go concept wise you have you know several observations a number of observations you make and the first observation we'll kind of work through a bunch of those right now the first one that you make is about how long colossians is in the passion translation compared to how long the same book is in other translations and i'll be able to put this table up on screen for everybody to see but can you explain what the problem is here right okay so one of the one of the inherent challenges with uh translating is that we don't always have exactly the same kind of word or a phrase or idiom or something like that in in the language that we're translating into which we call the target language so we're looking at greek and we're wanting to translate into english right they may not be the same habits of speech and different different words so sometimes what we need to do is be slightly expansive and what i mean by that is we might uh give a translation that has a few more words in order to convey the meaning because ultimately in translation we want to have in front of us uh the meaning of what the greek says we want the meaning in english so sometimes that takes a few more words and i think in the in the table there you'll see that uh counting the greek number of words and then counting any english translations number of words there is going to be more words in that english translation because we're changing into another language that works differently but if you compare the the difference of between like the esv the niv the nasb their percentage by which there's more words in english than there is in greek is relatively consistent but when you look at the passion translation uh so have a look there 2900 words to translate colossians and the next highest is uh is the nasd with 2122 122 words so the passion translation is longer than that by nearly 40 percent you see how close the number of words in english the rest of the translations get it's because they they are communicating a very similar meaning they all have a good grasp of what the greek is saying but simmons either just doesn't understand how to translate well so he uses extra words or he's adding in a lot and i think it's primarily it's definitely some of the the former but it's primarily that he is adding in a lot a host of material to his translation i think that's that is such a useful just immediate image to say okay wow that's that's a significant difference and this is this is in the book of colossians but this holds true across the entire translation there are sections that are much more than 30 or 50 longer in some places like twice as long um there's there's places where one verse that most translations would handle in 17 words he handles in like 42 words um this this kind of thing happens throughout throughout the work itself more or less in different books but always always a lot more than everybody else does in their translations so that's interesting thing there how about um the second observation you make which is uh something i thought was really helpful it's how simmons inconsistently translates the exact same greek phrase can you explain i'll put that table up as well can you explain like uh why is it significant and you've taken let me just highlight you've taken phrases in your tables two and three phrases that paul tends to use the same phrase in the same context and yet simmons is handling it in very imaginative ways so i'll just make a brief note about this i mean i think uh dr bitter is also taking a look at a little bit of the introductions that that simmons does there but when paul writes his letters uh depending on who he's writing to and what his purpose is he gives the same greeting in greek in table two uh vietnam that's um the same exact greek words take place in all five of those greetings that i've listed there and so if simmons was translating he would have the same result for each one of those verses and i'm not making an assumption that he didn't compare them but i think from what i've seen him talking about his translation he did this in in phases and he and as far as i can find from the publication dates he released them in phases as well which means that i think he was working on different books at different times and that for me is an indicator that he doesn't really know necessarily what's going on in the greek there and that he's not translating because those three words are very easy to translate into english and so you should get exactly the same phrase in all five places and the same thing with table three i think that that shows even more radically how he uses totally different words sometimes this is a riches of favor sometimes grace uh sometimes undeserved favor releasing grace uh so he adds verbs now this table three what is that usually translated as grace to you and peace grace to you in peace but all of these are examples of how he has very differently translated and and you know as i mentioned briefly before but can you account for the differences these being translated differently by different contexts are they put into strange contexts that would cause you to think of different things when reading the same words but not really i think dr buddha can speak to this as well but the nature of what's happening in the introductions to these uh even this epistolary uh literature these letters which are epistles i it's it's a it's a greeting it's a common greeting and the context isn't going to change that he's pronouncing grace in the lord jesus christ and peace from god the father that's not going to change the meaning of these words their meaning stays the same yeah and we'll return to some of this pretty soon we're all in a little bit let's talk about observation number three which is about adding or subtracting various parts of speech now you offer it to my count here 43 examples of adding or subtracting different parts of speech that are in colossians just in four chapters here it's a pretty short book it's a pretty quick read well we can't go through every example could you give us just an idea of like what you've found through this sure i can speak to some of alex's conclusions and and affirm them heartily all you have to do is look at the first two verses uh in in colossians to realize that not only what we we were just talking about ways that he inconsistently translates i might add inaccurately translates these are um you would not pass a greek one class if you were translating the phrases in tables two and three in the ways that he's doing and and not just because we want to be strict or pedantic but because it's just not a good translation so it's it's it's not serious to my mind as i look at this but then you start to realize as you read fashion translation next to the greek text that he's just throwing things in and it's it's a little bit more than a paraphrase this is why i characterize it as a commentary and a very interpretive commentary that if you look at if you look at colossians 1 1 and 2 i'll just read out what he has if that's all right and then note a few things it says my name is paul and i i've been chosen by jesus christ to be his apostle by the calling and destined purpose of god my colleague timothy and i send this letter to all the holy believers who have been united to jesus as beloved followers of the messiah may god our true father release upon your lives the riches of his kind favor and heavenly peace through the truth sorry he goes on through the lord jesus the anointed one and i'm sorry i left that bit out because on my copy i i made some notes and crossed out things that just aren't there in the greek uh so so he's adding entire phrases as well as words what uh what people will see if they're looking at alex's paper that i know you're going to post in observation 3 are things like adjectives that adjected true or heavenly there in verse 2 if we read on another verse the verb overflow isn't it's just not there but this is incredibly expansive and much more so than you would need to be to make this to make this communicate appropriately on the basis of the greek so it it it really is i think an egregious level of addition and change that we're looking at here yeah yeah this is this is a huge deal i mean we don't we we want to trust our translators that they're giving us a faithful representation of what god inspired to be written not an adaptation and additions and subtractions uh we we need to be able to trust these guys this is why we put them on teams right because it's like trust but verify you know and um and this is unfortunately not what's happening with the passion translation so there's 43 examples there that everybody can look at but in observation number four you talk about radical expansions radical expansions what exactly do you mean um alex by radical expansions and can you walk us through some of those sure so the difference there between a radical expansion and just adding some verbs and adjectives like we just spoke about there in the third point is that these seem to import whole sentences uh large new ideas not just single words or or phrases uh i think the the best example there is in chapter one verse five you'll see there that it's a one and a half lines to translate it simply into english and for him it ends up being almost six lines six lines long uh 54 words compared to 26 in my translation and uh it's it's not complicated greek really not complicated greed so it's not that the meaning needed to be explained by expanding it a bit it's just whole extra ideas that that which prove that he's bringing in something that he wants to say as opposed to making clear what's in the text and so i think it's the difference there is what is motivating a verse being longer than perhaps you might think it needs to be is it because it needs to be made more clear or is it because you wanted to say something and you took that opportunity in the text i think it's i think it's that the letter yeah may i interject something please do dr bitter and uh you can you can tell me if it's helpful or not but i think earlier i mentioned uh you know you this is not good translation from greek even a first year group level now if that sounds too academic for some people as if i'm you know here's the teacher the professor being pedantic and too strict let me put it in terms of a different analogy uh if if we were watching the president of the united states or some kind of diplomat in a room with a an official from another country in another language and they couldn't communicate in english so they have an interpreter there and if there was a very short and precise and exact and crafted sentence that the president uttered and then the interpreter goes on and on for a paragraph's worth of translation i can tell you what would happen to that interpreter very quickly he or she would be fired because it would be very clear that they're inserting what they want to say in in unnecessary excess and and again i think that's what's that's what we're talking about here in these first several observations and if we grant which i think most of your you know most of the people viewing this uh who love god's word would want to grant that paul's the apostle not brian simmons so so brian simmons job is to translate paul as the one who is inspired by the spirit of god then the interpreter ought to stick to the apostles text that was inspired by the spirit and not go crazy and expand it yeah even if you just expand it to make it feel better land better to to add stuff that you think if only paul had said it this way boy people would really connect with it that much more because you're not the inspired author you are you are supposed to be a translator but this is what brian simmons says over and over again so many of the changes he he gives like let me read the paragraph to you're mentioning in one five he says your faith and love rise within you as you access all the treasures of your inheritance stored up for you up in the heavenly realm for the revelation of the true gospel is as real today as the day you first heard of our glorious hope now that you have believed in the truth of the gospel these are nice sounding phrases these feel good but that's not the question isn't what bible feels the best in the most places this is the question is which one represents the original inspired work that god gave us so yeah let's talk about observation number five and this one i thought was interesting you said it's the use of unusual words unusual words can you walk us through that yeah this was a particularly interesting observation for me because i understand his he has a philosophy that he wants to add in certain verbs and nouns and adjectives to to be a bit clearer or to say something that he wants to say but what's different here is when he uses the same word that's not in the text but multiple times and for me that indicates when someone does that in a normal conversation with me and they keep saying the same word it's a key to me that they think that this is important and that there's some kind of agenda connected with that and i think that's what we end up seeing here for example the idea of revelation which does not appear seven times even though it's not in the greek text and it's almost with the idea behind it is that he wants to say there's something more to know than what is just what we're talking about here in the text and i think that fits with his overall perspective that aramaic is this recovered love language and you know those types of claims these uh also the use of the word rome there's some there's some ways in which we we can actually helpfully use this phrase but based on how i've heard him talk about it in different contexts he uses that word to mean something a little different to to what you find in a greek lexicon in its usage in the new testament so it's really misleading to use it uh even um in english even though it especially though it's not in the greek um he also uses the word release which is not actually a scriptural way of talking about how we obtain uh grace and peace as if there are uh some substances yeah and that's so he'll mention like i'm like releasing forgiveness or releasing grace upon you right like that's the way he adds it in there right and i think i've made this point somewhere else in the paper but when i forgive someone i don't release a mystical substance through the airways to them that now plants forgiveness on them and restores the atmosphere or something rather i cease to hold them in my in in debt to me for something that they've done as a sin against me for example it's it's an actual action it's not the release of some substance and the same thing with god's grace to us it's not some particle that comes through the air it's the way in which god acts towards us in jesus christ and in giving us his spirit i think these are really important because they're theologically charged terms and so as a translator you you don't want to come with a theological agenda you just want to be representing what the text says so that's why i think those are pretty important yeah now this got my attention so much this observation you made because this is uh you know it's pervasive i found this elsewhere like he's at okay so in in the hyper charismatic particular group he's part of now i'm charismatic so i'm not trying to rip on charismatics at all here but there are certain buzz words right that that those who are charismatic tend to use and hyper charismatic groups tend to use them even more brian simmons seems to have embedded these buzzwords throughout the text of the passion translation these types of things uh release and realm and revelation and somebody told me who has been part of this movement in the past they said i wonder if you put the word portals in there portals because in my group they always talk about portals so i'm like looking up portals yep there it is you know it's nowhere else no other translation does this but his does because it's not coming from the text it's coming from somewhere else sorry mike i i i think this is um i think this is really dangerous and really troubling to me because whether or not i agree with brian simmons interpretations of scripture or his theological views on a variety of things my hope would be that we're working from the same word of god that actually we could have a discussion that god's word is god's word and that's what we both will take as authoritative we both want to submit ourselves to god's word we both want to learn from what god has revealed to us we both want to bring our lives our doctrine and our understanding and our behavior more and more in line with the health of god's spirit according to his word is the standard but when you tweak that standard and make that standard speak in the words of your interpretation you are actually preventing people from hearing the voice of god in a way that might tell them something they didn't already think or didn't already know and that becomes really dangerous and it and it it it means this is not just not a translation it's it's a way to throw a veil over the scriptures to keep people from hearing god speak to them so powerfully through the words of the text that they might have their minds and their hearts changed by what god says not by what brian simmons says amen i so appreciate you saying that i think that's so valuable and if i can just add more support to what you just said there's it's no surprise to me that when i go to the passion translations publisher website and i see the official endorsers of the work those who've endorsed the passion translation you know bill johnson has his own version i actually got it here right the the one that has the forward by bill johnson in it and uh those who've endorsed it are almost all in fact everybody i've able to been you know i've done background checks on just about everybody to my ability here not criminal background checks i just look them up to see kind of who are they are they are the credentialed scholars that are endorsing it this is what i was looking for but i find that all of them are hyper charismatic people so bill johnson bobby houston che on lou engle james gold patricia king and the list goes on and so we find these words embedded in the text what you'll call a veil which i think is accurate like how's that how is scripture to change my theology if my theology is being placed into the text from my you know sort of corporate sort of mentalities and buzzwords that we've got and then we find all those who are endorsing it are from the same camp and then we find that there's just more and more evidence of this sort of thing so that's why i thought observation number five you put was really an eye-opener for people to see and to my knowledge there has never been the translation of the bible ever in this generation in english from people who believe in the five-fold ministry dreams visions trances angels coming the fire of god divine encounters people going to heaven and back getting fresh revelation with passion uncourt unrestrained attached to the translation that's a mouthful [Music] and that's what i'm trying to do with the passion translation and i've already got people like slam in it i got whole web pages telling how i'm the devil you know they listed me as one of the most dangerous christians in our in the prophetic apostolic spirit-filled movement right now they listed me as one of the one of the most dangerous because of this translation is going to change the church i said it takes my enemies to get it my enemies are prophesying what's what's gonna happen so let's talk about number six um observation six is about simmons having a habit of grouping verses together with joint verse numbers now i've seen other um paraphrases really do this i've seen this before not very common perhaps but i have seen it what's your concern there just that it proves that he's not translating in a in a direct way because if he was you'd be able to keep the sentences separate in a way that preserves the burst numbers and that's as you say rightly paraphrases is where you tend to see this but he has explicitly said that this is not a paraphrase right it's the wording is clear on the website that this is a reliable translation that can be used for teaching uh preaching a personal devotional study yeah yeah in fact let me let me if i can remember off the top of my head i think the way he words it is uh it's it's it's good for use as your primary bible for serious study right which is quite a claim it is quite a claim i mean if you can't even reference verse by verse from it it really is proving that you are separating and rewriting and moving parts of one sentence into another and adding together and subtracting and so on so what you end up with is a sentence which might make a sense logically but you can't you can't divide it up because you've changed change things so much so it's a brief observation and it's not just a matter of style as well i think alex has been really quite generous in the way he puts that let me maybe be a little bit sharper um what what he does at several points even in just in colossians when he combines verses is to run roughshod over the way the sentence is constructed in greek so as in any language so in greek you can emphasize things by where you put them in the sentence you can arrange your clauses with conjunctions like and or but or now or you can use certain kinds of prepositions for the purpose of to express the real goal of what you're saying and when he combines what he tends to tends to do in these cases in colossians is to completely obliterate what i would call the discourse logic the clear communication that ought to be there in a good translation that could make the difference between what's a supporting and what's a more ultimate point that paul and the holy spirit through paul is trying to make so it's not just a matter of style yeah awesome thank you for sharing that um so number seven observation number seven it's about divine titles so what exactly is the issue there can you walk us through that yeah again i think alex has done some some really good work here he he points out that simmons tends to add these are again additions at auction aren't there phrases like the anointed one uh father yahweh and uh and there are a lot of things we could say about this but i think it's another example of quite frankly it's the kind of thing you might expect to hear someone like him using in prayer as he stood up front and praying uh these extra addresses to god which in a context of prayer might be completely appropriate that that is we're addressing but what he does here is is not nearly as helpful i think i i will say you know i want i want to be charitable i absolutely want to be charitable and as i look through trying to find things to praise uh there are times when he will use as he did in those opening verses the term messiah which is more of a title to translate christos which is sometimes translated straight through as christ that's not a that's not a difference that really makes a big difference but i actually quite like the way he does that that messiah communicates this is this is the the one who was expected by the jews on the basis of the old testament uh to come as as this messianic figure this davidic kingly figure so i think he has a nice instinct in places like that but i think overall what he does is muddy the waters and and over complicate what are sometimes very simple sentences and phrases that paul uses by adding in these titles so let's talk about that anointed one real quick because that connects to something else i've been noticing as i was studying through i noticed the same thing with you know he he's he's translating christ and he'll put anointed one there which means he's translating as you've observed in your paper alex he's double translating he's taking the word christ which is mentioned once in greek and he's translated as christ anointed one i don't know if in some places he might even triple translate it christ and messiah and anointed one all in the same text but uh what's really interesting here is now when you take acts 11 11 26 b his translation of that passage where it says that in antioch the they were first called christians but his version says it was an antioch that the followers of jesus were first revealed as anointed ones and then i started to say wait a minute it when he says jesus is an anointed one which almost sounds like it's a category now and then he says we're revealed as anointed ones what's he doing here and then i find footage of brian simmons saying things like everything that can be said about jesus can be said about you how does it feel to be an anointed one is that good tell the person next to you even if you don't like them even if they're weird tell the person you are an anointed one go ahead and tell them i'm gonna say it as clear as i can make it folks everything you love about jesus will be said of you you have everything he has all of his righteousness all of his glory all of his authority and god has a secret and is getting out and the secret is this i love you so much i'm going to make you just like me first born of many there's coming a new breed a new day a new people are going to come i've chosen i want to be in that company now i want you to listen with your heart don't don't shut down because you think you know it all right but four times he says my sister my bride when he visited me 2009 walked through my wall breathed on me he said i will give you secrets and this is the first one he gave [Music] he said the word sister is the hebrew word equal not equal by bride so i translated that my publisher called up right after i zipped the manuscript to him and he said uh we're not going to publish the book i said oh whoa yo what up with that i mean what why did i do something wrong he said well you're telling people four times in your translation you're telling people that they're equal to jesus i said no bro i'm not telling you that he is i would never say that he says it if he tells you not to be unequally yoked with an unbeliever would he let his own son be unequally yoked an equal partner will murder a radiant infused with glory and look-alike partner everything you love about jesus will be said over you you're part of him now i mean you two have become one you are in christ you are in him so much he he puts all of his glory all of his beauty all of his righteousness strength authority give me a thesaurus he's given you dude everything if he were to give you any more than he's already given it would be a threat to the trinity it have to be a quartet you have been included you are destined you're predetermined to be like jesus christ you're going to be like christ are you hearing me okay then take this like a man everything you love about jesus will be said about you the father loves the son so much he's going to fill the earth with people just like him he's the firstborn among many there's a pattern a cornerstone there's going to be the glorious son of god in a corporate expression because now the body is christ christ is the body you have the dna of god you're a new species you're a 200 human being god and dust and deity have kissed and then i'm concerned and then i find a footnote in first peter 4 16 which says in the passion translation the word christian means anointed ones christ is the anointed one and his followers are joined in life union to him we too are anointed ones and so that starts to be weird to me what do you guys think of this it is it is weird and it's it's more than weird it's unhealthy and it's it's linguistically and historically inaccurate so to take your acts example where the followers of jesus are first called christians to try to read in messiah anointed one to christ and then transfer that to christianoi which we translate as christians is the kind of mistake that you would make if you don't understand how languages work and if you didn't understand the historical context of acts so what's actually going on there is they're being called probably derisively by the name of this figure christ who's become known to some people this this crucified so-called messiah it's not a name of honor at least not initially of course it's taken on that way so it's linguistically wrong it's historically wrong but once again you can understand there might be a theological desire to communicate to people what's true of jesus because he represents us as our mediator he has paid for our sins he has taken the curse for us he's given us free and full forgiveness and the father has poured out every blessing upon him is the one who's done this work perfectly and now that comes to you as a believer of course that's a theological truth that we see elsewhere in the new testament and we want to affirm and we want to rejoice in that but that's not what's going on when you have the term christian not even posts yeah yeah there's and there are definitely limits like you would probably not agree with the phrase everything that can be said of jesus can be said of you i mean that that is taking it without sort of any context uh looking at christ as he stands on our behalf as he goes to represent us before god and all that but um instead it starts to feel like there's identity confusion yes that's right so um that my concern there is that i being someone who who's kind of been in different camps in my christian walk i read the text and i i now think in the past translation i go oh somebody else might pass this right over but somebody who knows sort of the more intense hyper or charismatic groups would realize that this is now going to be a preaching point that because the lingo is placed in the text it's like preaching points for a particular sect a legitimate christian group but who has sort of particular beliefs that are more um unique are now read into the text you mentioned in observation number eight that there's the softening of difficult ideas what is that and where do you see that in colossians here so i think dr bennett spoke to that a bit already and he can speak a little bit more to it perhaps but i i see that one of the one of the features of god's word is that it includes things in it that we that challenges our assumptions and beliefs uh and and that's a good thing because god uses his word that is alive and active and pierces and divides uh a truth and gets us moving forward in our spiritual walk our knowledge of god and it does that by confronting uh the way in which we do or think about things right and so that means that we're going to come across things in the in the scriptures that we disagree with and need to uh change our ideas about them right i think tim keller has a good way of speaking about this he said would you not expect that a a holy and transcendent and majestic god will have some aspects to him that are surprising and sometimes uncomfortable or different or unexpected for you and so if if you come to the scriptures and everything is as you expect then then you're seeing yourself in the scriptures you're not seeing god and i think the softening of ideas thing is that in order to make some of the uh biblical truths that we hold dear more palatable to people brian has chosen a different approach to to translating these things and so for example i think this is a good good one that demonstrates that kind of idea uh chapter 1 verse 20. so the greek's very clear here that it's a verb which means to make peace and simmons has back to in original intent restored to innocence again and i've said that that is partially true in one sense if a result of forgiveness is that there is a restoration of a relationship and right standing and that's that's true but the the fact that peace needs to be made implies that there was not peace uh at first in fact there was enmity and that's a very clear teaching of the scriptures that we are at enmity with god in our flesh because of our sin against him and so there's and there's a need for peace to be made there's a hostility that exists because god is holy and just and so for transgressions and sin there is a need for forgiveness and so taking away that idea starts to change the way in which we speak about what it is that jesus did so this is not a harmless claim i i think this is a pretty major one maybe just another one uh in in one of his double verses chapter 1 verse 28 to 29 there's a very obvious greek word for warning there and he's and he says that awaken hearts and those are two totally uh they're different ideas there's a little bit of overlap in the sense that when we get a warning we realize wait this is important and i need to respond but it is it is a warning in the sense of there is impending judgment whereas awakening hearts just means come on guys get more excited about jesus you know those are two different ideas so that's why i have an issue with that kind of approach yeah now what concerns me is you can actually start to piece together some of his particular peculiar theological positions and preaching styles from his translation which i i mean ideally am i right dr better to say that the translator wants to be as invisible as possible like you don't want to look at it and think oh so and so translated that or this was translated from this group or that that perspective i think that's i think that's largely the case yeah that the translator the translator's job and this is what most translations are doing is to accurately bring through an understandable way what's there in the original text so that people can access that without knowing that original language and then on the basis of the good translation they can have debates about how to interpret it uh so so i think that's exactly what you i mean you have in other areas of life you know when we go to school and we're in high school literature classes our teacher might in an english class use a different translation of homer's odyssey to this one and it's known as the fagles translation well that's not because it's what robert fagles thought homer should have written and he changes the words it's just because he's done such a good translation it becomes known and that's that's not the kind of thing though that we do when we translate by invisible committee on uh on on the issue of bible translation so i think it's inappropriate yeah and and i i just like that you you highlighted the fact alex that he's softening ideas there's these sort of uncomfortable aspects and we all are aware that these are the very things that are the hardest to swallow in some of these teachings of scripture that are all of a sudden just missing in that place and that's concerning that's concerning um you uh mentioned also i'm gonna go to observation number 10 here where you talk about failure to reference authoritative reference works what exactly is going on there what do you mean by that normally in translation practice or scholarly practice with original texts in translation the further you depart from the accepted original meanings of words for example the more necessary it is to justify your new spin on the translation and given the fact that we've already pointed out just how significantly he's departing from every other translation that's something evidently he's wearing as a badge of honor you would expect that he would justify how he's getting from a to b with this translation but as far as i can tell we don't see that so normal normal authorities that every new testament greek scholar would acknowledge that you need to work with normal things like certain lexicons or dictionaries just don't appear at all as far as i can tell so you're left to draw the conclusion i'm afraid or i am that uh that it's just something that he wants to do to make a poetic gloss perhaps on the english text that he has in front of him rather than a legitimate translation of the greek text and you also mentioned um in this paper alex you mentioned that he's seems to be using strong's as a source but it's hard to see how he's using say what you would consider typical lexicons more authoritative and well-respected lexicons now average people a lot of people are just like strong's isn't strong's really good could you explain what the issue there is yeah i think dr bennett could say a little bit more about this but i would just say you do you do not use stroms as a because it's not an authoritative lexicon it has been helpful for a lot of christians over the years to go and get a sense of basic meaning in greek but there's been a tremendous amount of development in uh in scholarship and people were doing very specific research just into sometimes single words over decades and the result of that is it goes into authoritative scholarly lexicons and there's a reason that's that strong's is basically free i mean it's a it's a thick book but you can get it for a couple of dollars sometimes you can second hand for a dollar but and there's a reason for that because scholarly lexicons take so many decades very careful work and and so those are the things that you want to be quoting but uh strong's it it also indicates to me that he isn't familiar with the scholarly world and perhaps that's connected with the the training and so on because i've never come across a scholar referencing uh strong's as a part of their argument so i don't think that's exactly you if i go if i go in uh you know for pre-op or surgery some kind of complicated surgery that i'm going to need and i see that the only book on my surgeon's shelf is grey's anatomy okay at one time that was a really valuable resource and it's a kind of classic now for its illustrations which look a bit retro but that is not the thing that i want my surgeon studying and quoting to me when he's telling me how my heart surgery is going to go forward i want to know that he's been trained with the most up-to-date tools possible so he understands what he's talking about and has taken advantage of the advances but also the corrections that have been made since the time of something like grace or even early resource and that's the impression that you get when someone just cites strong strong is fine as alex says it's free i can remember in the days before i learned greek wanting to get my hands on every possible bible study resource i could to understand god's word better and so you wouldn't blame you know someone like that for reaching on the shelf or strongs or youngs or other old lexicons but a first year student who cites strongs in the paper for me this year is going to be fail for that because they've been taught that we have now a lexicon in greek called bdag and they know from my classes that bdag is the gold standard it's been updated and there's a lot of good research based on new evidence that goes into that there are better word definitions and glosses if you want to get a little poetic and you want to communicate it well b-tag is the place to go to look for those sources but that's nowhere cited here the reason why this weighs in so heavily is because on top of put all this together and then combine it with very murky educational history brian simmons claims that he's studied but it's it's difficult to get a solid claim about how much training he's had in in one place he might say you know i'm not a scholar and he openly admits i'm not a scholar and somewhere else he he talks about what it takes to be part of his passion project and he says not only do you have to be have a scholarly understanding of these things you have to also have a passion for god and you're like well wait doesn't that make you a scholar then if you're the lead of the whole thing i had brilliant leaders and men of god and mighty brainiacs tell me i had no business to translate the bible because i was not a greek scholar he said where are your credentials who do you think you are when you when you started this project um were you had you already had training in greek and hebrew or was this something that you had to jump into again or i had minimal background in biblical languages so yeah it was something that honestly something the lord has really helped me with um great i have learned a few languages i'm a linguist i i have a crazy delight in this kind of stuff i'm writing a book that will be entitled glorious eschatology it will be a scholarly commentary on the book of revelation there are tremendous insights that come when the aramaic text is placed alongside of the greek and it's a long arduous debate and i don't want to get into that with you i am a minority uh i'm among the minority scholars that that believe that the original autographs of the new testament for the most part were written in aramaic translated into greek as i study the original manuscripts of greek hebrew and aramaic i have uncovered what i believe is the love language of god and it's been missing from many modern translations but beyond scholarly level i think what qualifies a person to be involved in this monumental project of the passion translation is not just a exceptional understanding of greek and hebrew but to have a heart for god so it's confusing uh there's no cv for brian where you can actually look at here's his degree from this school when it comes to these things he has a a a degree in uh uh some sort of ministry i'm trying to remember right now what it is i'll put it on the screen for people a ministry position with like a focus on prayer that he got from the see peter wagner school which is a which is a hyper charismatic school but that's not a language's background and and his previous involvement in the piokuna translation he seems to have in some places at least greatly exaggerated how much work he did there and so you add that to this observations you're making about failing to reference authoritative reference works and i mean i'm going to use my word it looks fraudulent the content looks fraudulent to me yeah the fact adding together those parts of the picture and the idea of using strong's and so on it in my view it's almost like the most likely candidate for how he's thought about this is to look at it interlinear online which has uh you've got a running source of the original text and then a translation into english and then gone and done some individual work on various words and things and then consulted things like strums and added in his own verbs and nouns and adjectives and all that kind of thing and then kind of kind of reconstructed a translation uh and that's kind of the sort of thing that you'd expect you know with somebody referencing strong's and so on instead of a b and other reference words yeah i would love to see an interlinear version of the would passion translation would be pretty remarkable i think i thought about including something about that in the paper is that you you actually wouldn't be able to do an interlinear in in large chunks of it because the words and the phrases and the sentences of places don't correspond at all to the greek i think you didn't agree with that there would be huge gaps and then rearrangements it would be a mess brian simmons has frequently claimed that god gave him supernatural empowerment a spirit of revelation and secrets of hebrew and greek and that this translation represents those secrets of hebrew and greek one secret in particular he's actually said this is the secret is homonyms and this allows him to say here's a here's a word here's a word that you guys know this already but for the audience here's a word here's another word that sounds just like it and then he'll take the meaning of both of those and put them in the text so this allows him to double and triple translate words this is something you've observed in your observation number 11. what are some examples of brian simmons double and triple translating words and is there any chance this is just him being brilliantly insightful and getting secrets of the original language sure so uh i think uh 126 he revealed is a good good translation there i think that's that's fine but then it starts adding uh unfolded and manifested so that one becomes a triple translation uh is one sense uh i i think also with the four one as lord in addition to to master because in another place he he translates a master as employer but it would be kind of strange to have to say the same thing about god in this context so we can we can talk about the the homonyms as well i think dr bennett can add to this but that is more likely in hebrew for the occurrence for there to be homonyms because it's the language is composed of root letters and so you can get different words with some of the same rude letters and so that that doesn't happen much much less so in in greek and i i think more what he's doing here is he is taking the various possible meanings of one word and adding all of those meanings together not the meanings of two words that sound the same but rather different meanings of one word and then importing those in it we have a technical term for that which we call illegitimate totality transfer and just to break that down that means we take all of the possibilities or a good number of the possibilities of what a word could mean and then we just put all of those in the text but that's not how a language works we have when i say i'm going to cross a bridge you know in the context of what we're talking about that that means that i'm walking across an object constructed over water or an obstacle or something you're not going to tell me that what i mean by bridge is the game that is played by two people sitting the table right so we don't take all the possible meanings of every word and put it into every sentence and simmons seems to do that a lot here i think that's going on so he's doing that here and now let me just speak to this is this this is definitely not then a secret of greek that's appearing with these double and triple translating of words that's going on no it's not um we could you know alex is throwing around some fancy terms we love to use we like to make up big big phrases in uh talking about green but no the short answer is as far as i can tell you what he's doing here is actually what a good effective preacher does a lot of times when you want to drive home a point so if you want to say reveal there's a is a key concept in this verse 126 and you want to help your people understand that you start to use some different synonyms but there's absolutely nothing in greek that signals that we would have to do that here and i think it's interesting and we can start to see the shape of this just from what the work alex has done shows us it's interesting that he does that particularly in certain places which once again seem to fit the pattern of theology that you might have that you're describing and he doesn't do it in other places where you might also want to emphasize things so it's it's not just that i think he's um uh he's at at times bringing in too many slightly different meanings in the way alex was talking about with his bridge example it's that he's just piling up synonyms but he's doing that as a poet or as a preacher rather than as a translator yeah now could you speak briefly to the homonym issue that i did bring up now it's hard to tell where he's doing this with homonyms because from what i can tell he doesn't supply footnotes to tell you so in some cases i think we're just when you go there's this extra phrase in that in the verse i don't know where it came from i'm thinking that in some cases this comes from him thinking well there's in just because of the claims he's made there's an aramaic word and that aramaic has a homonym and the hominin means this and if i bring that meaning into it then i'm going to add an extra phrase to unpack that meaning as well so the footnotes don't really reveal this i don't think he wants criticism on this particular issue but uh is that legitimate um or or would you have anything to comment on what i've just shared uh no i don't think it's legitimate translation technique i don't think it gives us an effective translation that's not something that in any standard course of study you would be taught to do with either greek or hebrew it is something however that we've seen from time to time in his history of texts over the centuries and where we see it is where you get people who are making claims to secret knowledge and to like to play a word association game and jump from one word to another and then in some ways reverse engineer an explanation for how they got to the conclusion or the the final point they wanted to get to and so you get this in in some forms of jewish mysticism like kabbalah you've seen it in some of the gnostic traditions that alex mentioned earlier but there's no there's actually no way to um you couldn't footnote because there's nothing to put out there it's it's him associating and it's not standard linguistic practice another way to perhaps also think about it is uh if it were true that the i think he explicitly said something along the lines of it is the it is this is the secret god revealed to him of how all prophetic revelation works or something like that using using hebrew and homonyms now when jesus came to me and said i'm going to give you secrets one of the secrets he gave me was uh that of homonyms you see when you translate hebrew you're forced to say it one way or the other right well but it's both the lord showed me it's the homonymic structure of hebrew is going to be the key to understanding revelation in the last days including the book of revelation which you haven't got yet honestly if that were the case that would make it almost impossible to to know what the meaning of any text is because if everything was uh homonyms then you'd and that means you would have an infinite number of combinations across the whole of a text and you could make 50 different texts based on what the homonyms are which is uh homonyms are if wherever they apply in the text are more something that helps with interpretation or if puts emphasis on something a good example might be this one you'll probably all recognize is uh in judges 15 samson after taking out a thousand of the philistines with a with a jawbone he says uh with the with the jawbone of a donkey heap upon heap and what he means is i've made this pile of body using this jawbone and and the word for jawbone has the same three-letter roots in hebrew as the word for keep so he's just he's making he's a playful guy in chapter 14 he made riddles and so on so it's it's a it's a literary device but it's not a translation device and i think that's an important distinction too make well i think i think using even using the term homonym is a bit misleading there uh you know it's maybe doing the same kind of work that everything about aramaic manuscripts does you could talk much more helpfully about forms of word play if that occur in any language but you can still trace those in the way alex just did with the hebrew text of judges you can point to shared roots and a context which helps you to pin down the meaning and translate it carefully into the target language that's a different matter as far as i understand it to what he's doing here he's he's making associations in a playful kind of way that reminds you almost of what some of the post-modern deconstructionists do with texts there's like that seed of truth okay yeah homonyms do exist they occur in some places but this isn't how that works the you know the thing you're appealing to doesn't justify the thing you're doing with it and that that this happens when someone i think is trying to um pull i call pulling the greek over someone's eyes when they're trying to i mean we've seen it if you learn as soon as you learn a little bit of greek the first thing you notice is how many people only know a little bit of greek and in sermons and messages they're you know when they're like well this particular greek word doesn't just mean throw a ball it means throw it as hard as you can because you're angry or something like that and you go nah no that's not how it works so um yeah this is this is unfortunately it's manipulative to people who are trusting the man to represent language properly this is not the first time this has happened i can think of example in a mystical sufi islam for example they actually use a phrase very similar to what simmons does in terms of the love language of god and one of the the founding guys of that uh ability he was the 18th century mystic and he had access to a lot of these early third century diagnostic tests and he would make similar claims uh and and do things with the language and say there's the secrets behind them and things so this is not the first time as dr brittner pointed out that people have made these kinds of claims in history it's a it's a pattern that repeats itself so on number 12 observation number 12 you say that on a number of occasions simmons intentionally overrides the clear meaning of the greek text can you explain the example you give you give a few examples but from colossians 3 6 on this issue all right so uh 3-6 the the greek is uh wrote again it's very simple easy to translate i would say something like because of these the the wrath of god is coming and then i've gotten brackets there upon the sons of of disobedience but the the part that matters here is because of these the wrath of god is coming and he translates that as when you live in these vices you ignite the anger of god against these acts of disobedience and so uh what what it's clearly the point here is that because of these advices the greek is saying that the wrath of god is coming upon the people who commit there is very clear from a context but he rarely overrides that and says and adds in against these acts of disobedience because he seems to be trying to avoid the idea that god's wrath might be deserved by people but law that acts but if we look at what the new testament says about god's wrath and the need for forgiveness of sins but god doesn't god doesn't punish the acts themselves people are what commitments the implication almost comes across here from simon says that it's the acts themselves that are going to get wrath and need to be removed rather than that god is going to pour our breath on on people and i think there's no way of getting around he has changed what the text is saying yeah now that corresponds to the talking point i've heard from his circle actually uh bill johnson has said this like it's not that god's mad at you he's just mad at the things that are hurting you um and i would say that there's i mean there's a truth in that but that itself isn't exactly true it's like not really the whole story and and here it's uh unfortunately being placed into the text of scripture so you also give an example of from colossians 1 verses 28 and 29 could you explain that way yeah this one was a pretty clear case of directly overriding the text here because again it's very clear that the reason paul is writing to the colossians i think dr brookman can expand on this as well is is to bring about by the uh applying the word in the spirit that they will be presented mature in christ that this word will have an effect in them by the power of the spirit that will increasingly conform them to the likeness of their savior jesus christ right so this is the grace of god working in his people over time to make him more and more christ but he ends up changing it to say to present to every believer the revelation of being his perfect one and so what's changing in the meaning here is not that the believer is becoming more and more like christ but that he's saying that a revelation comes to them that they are his perfect one now we're not trying to comment theologically and say that that's a problem because in one sense it is true that because of the work of jesus christ we are made we we have his righteousness so when god looks at us he sees the perfect works of his son instead of the sins that we have committed because jesus has paid for that right so we heartily want to affirm that and view that as really at the core of the gospel but is that what paul is talking about here no definitely not he's talking about the ongoing way in which people are being made more and more like jesus so i think it's totally changing the meaning of what paul is talking about don't know that i have that much to add other than amen to that i mean that's he's he's completely switched it around in the way that alex just described and so you know i i feel really i feel really um i feel really passionate as i look at this so-called passion translation that that is not going to communicate to people opening up their bibles or listening to someone who's preaching from this text what it is that the holy spirit through paul is trying to communicate to them here in this text god's saying he wants to present believers mature that he's at work by his spirit in colossians especially of all places not just to give you revelation there's no revelation in this text no word that even comes close to revelation but in the context what we've got is something else that's that's that's rich and that's missed it's the fullness of god offered in the knowledge of christ that is the thing that believers are then being rooted and grounded in and growing in spiritually and that's been completely disfigured by a translation that we read in this case let's look at observation number 13. uh you mentioned inconsistency in italicizing additions or expansions um can you just in a sentence explain like what's the point of italics in the bible and why do you have a problem with the way they're not showing up in places in the passion translation sure i mean this is a relatively brief point but simmons has said that when he has supplied new additional words to make something more clear or put an expansion that he would italicize it so that you'd be aware and i'm i'm thankful for that as an approach there are some translations which do do that if they need to supply a noun to make a sentence work in english or something then they'll italicize it and i think that's that is that's commendable uh the problem is you also don't want to see italics everywhere because that means that a lot more is going on than just the translating as we've mentioned however what i think has happened here is there's a good number of times and it happens in almost all of the books as far as i'm aware that he's translated is that there is material in there which counts as one of those additions or changes that he's made or expansions that he doesn't italicize and i'm definitely not going to venture an opinion on whether that's intentional or not it may just be editorial but it is very problematic because then you don't know look at this text is the is this brian simmons or is this paul i mean we have a problem in a whole host of ways as we've been talking about but i think specifically here not having the italics when he has actually added things is a real problem one of the things everybody really seems to want to know about because we when we talk about like aramaic and big broad reaching issues uh that takes a little bit for people to kind of like think how is this really affecting the translation when i'm when i'm actually trying to live it out so one thing people want to know is like what are some areas where the passion translation has changed like practical instructions like where the bible applies to my life and you give three areas where i think this happens the the instructions and colossians between slaves and masters husbands and wives and children and parents so let me start with the first one how has simmons translation altered something really in in the teaching on slaves and masters well one of the things alex points out in this paper is that he opts for employees and employers instead of slaves and masters in 322 and then 4-1 and again i think i can i can i have a guess as to what's going on here there are a lot of commentaries and a lot of pastors who will in both colossians and similar texts in ephesians uh trying to make this more relevant and understandable for people today by explaining it in this way there's a kind and there is that's there's a kind of analogy that works from ancient slavery to ancient employment but to contemporary employment uh and we feel this when we go to work someday but it's not a straight line and it's not that's an interpretation again that's a commentary that's that sort of thing is a claim that belongs to the commentary where you're making an argument about how we moved from greco-roman culture to 21st century southern california culture or american culture whatever it is that's our target it's not a translation and the thing that we miss then is the strangeness of the translation what we want is once again to be surprised by and slightly set we want our attention peaked we want to be a little bit off balance when we hear this ancient text that's given to us in a fresh accurate translation so that we can ponder it and with the help of god's spirit come to understand what's he saying to us in it and so when i read slaves and masters my first thought as a as a 21st century american might be oh that sounds a little bit like southern slavery in u.s history but then i can do before thinking of course and realize that's not either exactly what's going on here and so maybe it sends me to a study bible maybe it sends me to my pastor maybe it sends me to another resource to try and understand what were the dynamics between ancient slaves and masters and how are those similar but also very different to what's going on in for example an employee employer relationship so it doesn't belong in a translation even though one might make an argument for it as an analogy for application yeah so one potential application of the text has become the translation of the text which has removed the initial or original meaning of the text and replaced it um what about the teaching between husband and wives how has since represented that in colossians this is a this is an example of the problem that he faces when he comes across something that perhaps he doesn't exactly like the idea of or wants to soften the idea and so he makes an appeal to a resource a language resource that is really problematic now this is something that if i if i back in in first year greek or something i was asked to do a word study on i could do this in two minutes no problem really straightforward and you'd see the results would be so first uh what we're talking about here yeah tell us tell us the word that he's in your opinion translating wrong here what is it i'll do that so in in chapter three verse 18 the greek is submit yourselves to your husbands all right and the the greek is hupatasa this is uh so i'll read you the trans the uh meaning that's given directly by vdag that authoritative reference work which is to subject oneself to be subjected or subordinated or to obey for example that's that's one of its meanings listed there it's and it's lists uh data lists that have a meaning in this context so simmons puts a footnote here and uh this is really i found this kind of somewhat humorous because it's it's strange he he says that kupataso can mean attached uh but the problem is the word attached there is in its meaning in beta is to to add a document at the end of another document i.e to attach or staple or append so clearly paul doesn't have in mind here a husband and wife being stapled right so that he he actually doesn't seem to understand how a lexicon works and how the meanings of words work you can't just say oh one possible meaning is this therefore that's that's what it means here yeah so ultimately it seems that he's he's taken what is a very obvious meaning that kind of everybody we know what this means let's talk about how it applies let's carefully understand it in context and all that but we know what the word means um and he's replaced it with a meaning that seems illegitimate and i i can tell you from having listened to many many hours of his content he's extremely interested in changing uh the churches or guiding the church's perceptions on the role of women both in marriage and in churches and he would say he has a very egalitarian view ladies are you sitting down it says women wives submit to your husbands right the greek language indeed says submit what if the original text was written in aramaic and translated into greek and they missed it a little bit here's the aramaic text what makes some men mad here i just ruined your abuse system of your wife here you stop it but it says that wives be tenderly devoted to your husband as the church is tenderly devoted to christ just that should sell the passion translation just that one verse you know you should get it just for that come on ladies women of god rise up and and and silence all these critical know-it-alls that say women should never do those things oh yeah make them look like idiots i dare you ladies come on challenge this religious spirit that says women can't teach women can't pastor women can't prophesy women can't what does this women can't stop how come it's always the men saying that by the way anyway you got me on my high horse now i don't actually care what his view is there i just care that his view isn't causing him to change the bible in that regard and that seems to be what's happening here is that right that's exactly right as far as i'm concerned i mean it's it's just completely irresponsible translation this is basic arithmetic when it comes to translating this this greek in this context and so the only explanation i can think of is that you want it to mean something different and so you are translating it in this way and as you say fine perhaps from other texts or for other reasons he wants to put forward a different view of the bible's teaching on marriage but you can't do that from this text that's not what it means here and even i mean this is fascinating so those of us who who love god's word and want to submit to god's word even though it's not culturally acceptable in certain ways anymore or it's the maybe not the dominant view uh we're we're pointing out that in this case for example it means to be subjected to to be subordinated to to obey that's the meaning of the word and we realize we've got to grapple with the implications that follow and the debates that follow if we want to say this is god's word not just paul's word and so we can't we can't relativize it i would have agreement if i were sitting here with a feminist liberal scholar who didn't agree with me that this is god's word but she would look at the same word in the same text and say there's no way you can translate it in any other way and that's why she or he might not like what paul's saying here so people from very different ideological backgrounds would translate this responsibly in the way that most translations do not in the way we see in the passion translation right yeah we want to relegate our theological discussions post-translation instead of pre-translation and that's and that's what he's done in many cases with with texts especially as they relate to women i i think he feels as though he's being a champion for the cause of women but i have a feeling that women want to know what the bible actually says and not and not have some sort of agenda pushed on to it we sure want them to know yeah yeah now on children and parents uh what was your observation there this is another example just again a straightforward issue of his uh how he does his work in greek there is no other way to to translate what this means the greek word here in chapter 3 verse 20 children obey your parents it's and that that means to follow instructions to obey uh to be subject to that's that's without doubt and it says here see this uh he double translates it with both words incorrectly as respect and pay attention to now one of the ways in which children respect their parents is to obey them but we all agree that those are those words have different ideas even if there's some kind of connection it really softens the idea that children are to be subject to their parents and that is something that if you read the book of proverbs you'll see is a key part of the way in which god blesses children they're they're instructed and they grow and they're blessed by the teaching and instructions of their parents and so i think that's not up for negotiation no i agree and if if somebody was telling my teenagers or my younger children on the basis of this text that it's sufficient for them to tell me you know what dad i respect you i'm paying attention to what you say but i'm not going to do what you say they would have it wrong because there's a difference there what the text says is you have to obey your parents not just merely respect and pay attention to yeah so you what what i'm trying to point out here is uh particularly in our culture husbands and wives children and parents this is this is actually altering the way we apply the bible into very important relationships in our lives and i think that god wrote what he wrote and we have no right to alter any of that stuff um you can you can follow it or not to you but yeah that's what it says so in your paper you also give a list of uh 10 i believe it's 10 verses in colossians where simmons quote makes speculative theological interpretations either transforming the meaning of the text or adding his own ideas into it unquote people can read your paper and they can go through all 10 examples if they want but can you please explain the example from colossians 3 16. i thought that was really insightful this is where simmons handles the phrase spiritual songs but he translates it as prophetic songs what were your thoughts on that yeah so so he says there's a word there for spiritual in greek and of its ways of thinking about what it can mean nowhere in that range of ideas at all is the idea of prophecy there is no nothing connected with that at all and so this is an example of where he has imposed something on on the text there that he wanted to say my understanding is this is connected to a spontaneous types of worship that uh that involve an element of prophecy a god speaking through a person saying something that god plans to do or something like that but that is that is not the context in which this is being spoken issue here is the nature of the speech yeah the nature of the speech so let me let me hammer this home because i think it's really important uh in brian simmons commentary on the song of songs he has the following phrase the power of prophetic song prepares hearts for harvest the new thing god is unfolding will require new songs to be sung the seasons of singing and dancing the season of singing and dancing is here what i'm suggesting here is that brian simmons presents prophetic songs as a key to end times revival brian simmons then unjustifiably inserts the phrase prophetic songs into colossians which then creates a platform for a teaching he's bringing with him to the text of scripture and this is the kind of thing we see happening with the passion it's not just um well that wasn't quite accurate in addition to that there is like no there's like a theological agenda that seems to be in place here which is which is why i'm trying to make a big deal about this this whole thing with the passion project bringing you guys on to share your thoughts on this so yeah that was why that example stood out to me because i'm going wait a minute i've he's talked about prophetic songs a lot and guess what now he's got a scripture to prove that he's right but it's an interesting connection because in addition to being just flat out wrong in terms of the greek translation it's also problematic in the in the contextual use so it's not just that linguistically we can say that this is not possible but contextually it's obviously not the case because he's contrasting this to other types of speech and remember that if colossians as a whole is paul is right and uh he's he's teaching doctrine about christ that can correct the the ways in which things have been going wrong for the colossians that has affected the way that they've lived their lives affected the way they relate to one another affected the things that they say and do and so he's trying to correct those through this text what prophecy has to do with any of that anyone's guess so as you say it seems to have just been oh this is an opportunity for me to put this prophetic songs idea yeah it's fascinating for me to listen to this and hear you decode the passion translation for me um because effectively that's what it sounds like is going on here that there are some coded phrases that he is inserting without any justifiable warrant in the original text in order to trigger a kind of reaction or agreement from people with with his theology of course that's really dangerous but it also does the thing alex just points out it misses that what's going on in this verse in 316 we want we want the word of christ that is the word that christ has given through his of his apostles the first century apostles whose writings we have and if we're talking prophets let's talk about the old testament prophets who also maybe call psalms that we have in the old testament written down for us call those spiritual songs we want we want the bible to dwell in us richly so that god can use his word inside us to remake us and to keep us from error keep us from living in ways that displease him that's not anything to do with uh what you just described that most people from that certain background would understand when they read prophetic songs which is not what the text says yep that's it that's it right there all right you also offer this is observation 16 uh sectarian theological ideas you offer five different examples of places where simmons ads which you call sectarian theological light we're already talking about this with the prophetic songs that's it's not the point isn't whether it's true or false the point is it's sectarian as it as in it comes from a sect it's not from christianity as a whole it's from a particular sect and it's a theological idea that's now being imported into text one of them that struck me though of all five was colossians 1 2 what did he add there and we kind of mentioned it earlier but let's highlight it now when we use the word sectarian this is not meant to be uh to write a divisive or uh derogatory in any way what we're simply it's simply an adjective that that describes that this is a this is a teaching that's associated with a particular group of people like we have different groups in christianity who believe slightly different things about some things and sometimes very different things about others but so what we mean here is that the terminology that he's using is related to what you might describe as his own set that has their own language certain terms that they use and the problem with that is he hasn't just written this for that group of people he's written he's done the passion translation for the whole world and what you end up doing when you use terms that only you and your group tend to use is that it excludes everybody else from the the actual meaning that they would take if they had the right translation so i think that's problematic just in the first place but here again to mention that idea of releasing it is it is something that we just don't have that verbal idea in the greek text for the ways in which the new testament talks about things like forgiveness or peace or grace or things like that it has this mystical idea of a substance or a realm i know in the theological circles he's in this a lot of discussion of changing atmospheres and releasing anointings and these are these are ideas that seem to be disconnected from the ways in which the new testament talk about those things so that's why i think it's a problem to use phrases like releasing when that's just connected with his particular group yeah i know okay on a personal level like pastorally i've kind of had a concern for many years when i enter into a church group and they have a lot of like buzz words that frame their understanding of spiritual things and christian sort of revival perhaps and these words don't have their root in scripture not not just the words but rather the idea itself you're going is that idea even biblical you know like where's that idea coming from but it seems core to their concept of revival and so the concern here is that like releasing i'm releasing over you this i'm releasing over you that this is a big buzz word for brian's movement but now it's in the scriptures now it's placed in the bible and and it's earlier we talked we said that the word itself isn't in colossians 1 2. it's added by brian simmons now we're talking about not just the presence of a word but the presence of a concept that's foreign to scripture being added and that's a different thing altogether and so you have a list of several examples of this kind of thing that you give there that we should be aware of um it's hard to reform to solo scriptura to what go back to the text right back to the what the scripture says when the scripture is being adapted to fit your sect your particular group let's talk about basic grammatical errors now you discovered several bait what you call basic grammatical errors if you could just really quickly just kind of like shotgun us through several examples of where brian simmons has made these this goes towards his basic credibility as well um as someone who should be trusted with handling being the lead translator of a whole bible translation yeah sure i'll mention briefly a couple and i think uh dr brennan can talk just a bit a little bit about grammatical skill in general and how that what we see being displayed in simon's translation the thing is that when you start learning a language newly freshly at a basic level a lot of what you will focus on is some some basic rules for how the language it works as a whole and then at a micro level how sentences can be constructed how what phrases mean and what they do and then of course what words mean how they fit into sentences and it just seems to me that some of these basics don't show up in the way in which uh simmons translates things so the first one i've got here is an example in chapter one verse five uh in greek the idea of how this particular phrase works is that it explains what something is so when it says uh the word of truth uh it is namely meaning this word of truth that we're talking about is the gospel it's explaining what that is but he he makes it become an adjective and says it's the truth of the gospel uh rather we're saying the truth that we're talking about is the gospel now of course we affirm the gospel is true i'm just saying grammatically uh he is he changes it around one of the examples that alex points us to is in three nine where uh where simmons has lay aside your old adam's self as an instruction um and and there's something also strange going on in the footnote there he says well i translate from the greek the aramaic actually have imperative but what he has given us in english is an imperative it's a command and what you should what you should see in a good translation just there is that we're being given the grounds by which we can stop speaking falsely actually that this is because you have since you have put off the old man this is something that points us to what god's already done for us in christ as the basis that gives us the spiritual ability and power to do the command that precedes it but by changing it he's actually giving you a series of commands and i'd say he's kind of stripped away the good news that empowers us to fulfill the commands that we have been given and so and your criticism here if i understand it right is he seems to in the footnote rightly acknowledge that it's it's one way in the greek it's another way in the aramaic he says he's translating the greek but he translates it the aramaic way and it's and it and it makes it imperative instead of uh a statement of fact yes i think so that he says he's got an air american photo i never make something in front of him i don't know what that is or if there exists anything but uh he he says that's an imperative but i'm looking at the greed well as i look at the greek it's not an imperative what it is instead it should be translated in a way that conveys the sense of because or since this is true it's it's a participle actually and we hardly ever have participles that act as imperatives and certainly not this one in this context so what you lose there practically is that all the commands that have been given in verse 7 and verse 8 prior to that uh put away what put off these things bits of rage hatred cursing filthy speech all the rest those are meant to be understood as grounded in the fact that you can do this because you've put off the old man when you were united to christ by faith and this is possible because of the work of christ on your behalf instead what we get from simmons is just another thing to do so it's up to you to lay aside the old adam as i read him there and that i think is a serious result of the mistranslation here we've got now um observation 19. and this one i thought was extremely helpful this is about how it i'm going to put it in my words and please correct them and just summarize this for the audience if you would but i think this is about how simmons has effectively erased the style of the biblical authors and kind of replaced it overwritten it with his own style so it's almost as though he's the author of all these letters could you unpack that or even disagree with me if i've overstepped it at all sure again dr panel can speak a bit to the nature of disciplinary literature these the what these letters are like i would just say to give a clear example if if i write a a birthday letter to my mother and and mail it off uh to the uk she's gonna open that and she is gonna read he's gonna know that i'm the person who wrote it because of the words that i use the way i i say things there will be phrases that are that she can recognize and she's gonna my imprint is gonna be on that later you know what we get this all the time with my wife right because if i'm busy and she's texting from my phone i give her the words to use because she just texts different and she'll add more smiley faces and stuff and i'm like no just she goes just say yep that's the whole text and i'm like yes that's the whole text just say yep and she would never do that and so it's like yeah it's ours it's kind of our style of speaking yeah right and if i called my friend over the phone and said please write a birthday letter to my mother and mail it off i mean she's immediately going to recognize hey listen although he's communicating this similar thing happy birthday and i love you and so on it is not coming from me and it's not the words that i've written it's my friend's idea about what i had said right now and i think that that is uh conceptually what's going on going on here once again if we take i mean if we if we begin from the assumption that this is not just paul's word but it's god's word written through paul delivered through paul by the holy spirit then we also have to think about the fact that the holy spirit formed the apostle paul to be the person that he was from the time he was formed in the womb from the time he was born through his schooling the way he learned to write greek and use certain phrases in certain ways and that the holy spirit formed him in just the right way that he wanted to form god used paul as an instrument to take the gospel out to the nations and to write it down for us god did not form brian simmons or any other bible translator in that kind of special way because brian simmons is not an apostle like paul is an apostle neither am i neither there's anybody who sits on a translation committee and so what we lose is not just an interesting note of this is paul's style this is simmons style we lose the holy spirit's pauline style and what he wants to say clearly through paul to us i think that's for me the real issue yeah wow wow that's to me that's really eye-opening it's like what what is the some of the cumulative effect of all these changes across all these various books of the bible so let's talk a little bit about your conclusions now um if you could just in a short summary if the average person average christian walks up to you they say hey alex dr bittner i've got this passion translation my friend gave it to me i read some verses my favorite verses in it and it's just like really coming alive to me you know but i don't know i heard some weird stuff online there's this mike winger guy who seems to be a critic of this thing but i don't know if he speaks you know the truth or not so what would you say what are your just your summary conclusions about the passion translation for everybody to hear i think just pastorally you'd want to say it is it is a really great thing to be excited by god's word and excited about about growing in knowledge of it and enjoyment of it and loving god more thoroughly that is that is something that you never want to crush but god has also given us the way in which that is best accomplished and that's through his word and by his holy spirit that creates faith in our hearts when we hear the truth and i think simmons has so radically altered the text of scripture that what you have is not scripture in your hands it contains scriptural truths it contains many of the ideas that the bible communicates but what you're holding in your hands it does not qualify as scripture dr bittner if someone asked me what i thought about the passion translation and they were getting excited about it uh like alex i'd want to say i'm so so excited for you that you're opening up god's word that you want to read that but what you have in your hands is not a good translation of god's word it's a it's passionate it's poetic but it's not a translation and if you really want to hear god speaking to you you need to put that down and you need to go pick up any of another number of other translations and we can talk about great translations that are there but that is not the one to be reading if you want to hear clearly what it is that god has been saying to his people for 2 000 years and continues to say freshly to us it's just not a good translation now in your opinion gentlemen do you think the pastor translation should be on the shelves of stores and christian bookstores or wherever so i i thought about this a little bit i'm as a as an advocate of a an unregulated market in the sale of goods and services i think individual businesses should have the rights to sell what they choose to if i was a bookstore or thinking about a theological library or something uh absolutely not it is it misrepresents what it is in a very material sense and so whilst a book show a bookstore might have it on its shelf i really do not think that a christian should have it on their shelf upon them yeah i like that as well i mean i don't really i'm not looking at i'm not a band books kind of person but when you group them together as here's a group of bible translations it seems like this shouldn't be on that shelf at least you know to call it like a translation as you guys have made pretty clear um now here's a question i've received several times i'd like to get your guys thoughts on this which is could somebody become a christian if the only bible they have was the passion translation and and they read it could it be used in leading people to christ would it be a faithful guide to to lead them to salvation there are a lot of things that god can do in less than ideal circumstances so i would i wouldn't want to preclude that but i think if i can go back to an analogy i tried to make earlier could could my heart surgery be successful if my surgeon had only been using grey's anatomy or a very outdated and and in need of updating kind of resource i wouldn't want to trust myself to that i really wouldn't so i i'm not going to say god can't do miracles he does them all the time in changing dead sinners into alive saints but i don't think uh i don't think this is a resource that i would want to give any good scans and i i really agree with that i think god can do anything accomplish anything that that's according to his world i i would say that in reading the passion translation i've read large sections of it not just colossians in it you don't find any claims like oh denying the trinity or denying that jesus is the one in whom we must have faith and that we need salvation and so on so there's certain elements which are true and can be used in sharing the gospel but it is it is so defaced as the scriptures that uh i certainly wouldn't recommend in any way being used in evangelism or anything like that yeah it it almost feels to me like the question while valid it leaves so much unsaid it's kind of like saying can an abusive parent still raise a physically healthy child and you're like well yeah they could but we're sort of not talking about the important part here at this point and it's the same thing you know it's like could i survive if i eat out of the garbage well yeah you'll survive but it's not like it's not good you don't want that and so the pastor translation may may well lead someone to the true gospel um but but that's not the only function of scripture it's the whole revelation of god's word and so there's so much more there that we need so yeah maybe as a follow-up to the last question i'll ask this that what you know other than just salvific questions what effect do you suppose the passion translation might have on a person who reads it as their main bible i i have to i've said not read any more than colossians uh in the passion translation but on the basis of colossians alone i think they are going to get a less clear view of the wonderful gracious work of god in christ for us than they would in other translations i think they're going to come away with a sense that they need to work hard to receive this release and revelation that uh you find in the pages of the fashion translation rather than to hear that they need to grow in knowledge of christ and thereby be filled with the fullness that god is pouring out into its church and just people so i think those are some practical shortcomings that people run into if they depend on the passion translation that's just speaking to corruption i think perhaps more broadly as well in taking into account what i've read across as a whole is it's not just in colossians where he's radically transforming what the scriptures say so i would say that for that christian uh that they aren't ultimately going to be confident that the bible is their source of authority in fact it may end up being that in a lot of things that they read brian simmons has become their ultimate authority even though that would shock them but that's the reality because so much of what you're reading is from the hand of brian simmons instead of uh from the mouth of god through his prophets and apostles i'm mike winger and my goal with all the free content i put up online is to help you learn how to think biblically about everything but you really can't learn how to think biblically if the bible you're reading represents the thinking of brian simmons and not the revelation and the inspiration of the holy spirit if you ever want to join me i go live every week on mondays and fridays at 1 p.m pacific time i do bible studies i do apologetics theology and i do a q a that's the friday video 1 pm and we do q a answering your questions from the live chat giving you guys the best answers that i can come up with for you're often very challenging questions take care

Channel: Mike Winger

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Keywords: the passion translation, mike winger, alex hewitson, brad bitner, dr brad bitner, is the passion translation good, brian simmons, colossians, TPT, the passion translation review, the passion translation reviews, tpt colossians

Id: 7OfUZyCOJi4

Length: 140min 32sec (8432 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021