YOUNG'S LITERAL TRANSLATION (YLT)

A fellow Christian I have corresponded with has a great aversion to Bible commentaries. The reason is that he feels they just represent man's ideas and are strongly colored by the author's preconceived doctrinal stances. He might be surprised to learn that good scholarly commentaries are quite open-minded in their approach and often take views contrary to the denominational communities they come from. These authors are sincerely driven by pursuit of the truth, wherever it may lead them. Some of my favorite Gospel commentaries were actually written by Catholic scholars who happen to question the doctrine of Mary's eternal virginity.

My friend desired to try to get as close as possible to the original text so that he could make up his own mind, free from the prejudices of others. I applauded this goal, but questioned his method of going about it, which was to rely on a “literal translation,” namely Young's Literal Translation. YLT was certainly not the translation I would have suggested since I have several major objections to its use in any but an ancillary way. My reasons are given below.

1. YLT was published by the biblical scholar Robert Young in 1898 and influenced by the KJV. The English language has changed a lot since that time. So unless one is thoroughly steeped in archaic King James English, a number of the words Young uses will be open to misunderstanding. Just one example from a passage in Acts:  YLT has the people “magnifying” the believers in 5:13. A modern dictionary lists several definitions for magnify including intensify, exaggerate, increase in significance, enlarge, laud, and esteem. A good translation will zero in on the appropriate modern translation of the original Greek word rather than leaving the ambiguous or outdated King James language for the reader to wrestle with.

2. Our knowledge of ancient Greek and Hebrew languages has grown by leaps and bounds since 1898, especially since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a myriad of commonplace letters, bills, etc. in Greek which differ in usage from Classical Greek documents. Thus, what Young felt was the most literal translation in his time may often differ from our current understanding. If one truly wants to know what each key Greek word meant at the time, a multi-volume word study like the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology is invaluable since it will trace a word from its earliest appearance in Classical Greek to common (koine) Greek to translation from the Hebrew in the Septuagint to all major occurrences in the New Testament, with a thorough study of all the word's nuances. Similar resources are available for biblical Hebrew.

In lieu of that somewhat expensive option, the best alternative is to purchase an analytical concordance or consult one on-line. My favorite is actually Young's Concordance, by the same man who came up with YLT! You will not only have a short definition of each Greek or Hebrew word, but will also see at a glance what synonyms the Biblical writers might have used, but chose not to. Most importantly, you can do your own word study by identifying every instance in the Bible where that particular word appears. Develop your own definition by considering and comparing the word's use in each of these contexts.

3. Another objection I have to YLT is that the word “literal” misleads the reader into thinking it is the only translation free from human error. Actually, it is in the worst category of all translations – one developed by a single person, rather than a team. Other than the modern paraphrases of the Bible, all reputable translations are joint efforts conducted by carefully chosen teams of experts in Hebrew, Greek, ancient history and theology. And these teams almost always go out of their way to have representatives from most Protestant denominations and a fairly wide spectrum of stances from conservative to more liberal. This is about the only way that bias in translation can be kept to a minimum. With a single author, even one who tries to be strictly literal, it is much more likely that human factors will enter into the final product.

If you carefully compare the original Greek with Young's translation, you can see that he constantly had to make value decisions involving not only the proper English word to use, but also the proper word order of each sentence, its punctuation, whether to capitalize a word or not, and whether to include articles like “the” or “a.” Every translation, even YLT, is in effect a commentary, whether we like it or not. My friend cited the fact that Young did not use the word "Satan" in his translation, and therefore that invalidated the concept of a literal devil. But Young did chose to include the definite article “the” and to capitalize his preferred word "Adversary," thus indicating that the Bible was talking about a specific entity or official office, not a mere internal impulse.

4. Now to my major objection! Translation from Greek or Hebrew is actually the second step in a process, not the first. To translate, one must first have a reliable document in the original language to work from. If you don't, then all your effort is tainted from the start. When Young was preparing YLT, the standard OT text was the Masoretic Text and the standard NT text was called the Majority Text. Since Young's time, the Dead Sea Scrolls have given us original Hebrew manuscripts for OT books dating some 500 years closer to the original time of writing than the documents Young relied on. Scholars have also recognized that sometimes the Septuagint translations of the OT dating to about the time of Christ also reflect readings which appear to be closer to the original than the Masoretic Text.

The NT situation is even more changed than when YLT was written. The conventional wisdom at the time was to look at all the NT manuscripts and go with the reading that was present in the majority of those manuscripts. We now recognize that sheer numbers are not what counts; we need to look at the age of those manuscripts instead. So all modern translations generally go with the Greek readings that are present in the oldest manuscripts and give preference to them. YLT is based strictly on the  Majority Text of the NT and for that reason alone I would consider it practically useless. Most good modern study Bibles will even have extensive textual footnotes listing which manuscript sources they used for those cases where there is a question. Again, that helps the reader to make up his own mind regarding how sure we are of the original upon which the translation was made.

The epitome of this textual issue can be seen in reading Young's translation for the end of Mark's Gospel. If all you had was YLT to go on, you wouldn't have the slightest clue that the verses after 16:8 are highly dubious. Even in minor cases, the presence of explanatory footnotes (not included in YLT) can be valuable. For example, going back to Acts 5, my NRSV Study Bible footnotes the first half of verse 6 with the comment “Meaning of Gk uncertain.” That is helpful in cases where one might be tempted to otherwise read too much into a verse that is in fact difficult to understand in the original.

The bottom line is that however badly one might want to directly know the precise meaning of every verse in the Bible without any translation errors, one must always be somewhat reliant on fallible human experts for help.