And yet the differences are inevitable and irremovable in the handwritten transmission of the text). Of course, these are mainly misprints or involuntary changes in the text (introduction into the text of linguistic features characteristic of a given area and century). But there are some discrepancies that change the theological meaning of the whole phrase, and in these cases the choice between different manuscripts is a semantic interpretation. For example, in some manuscripts of Heb. 2:9 reads as "That by the grace (χαριτι) of God, He may taste death for all." In others, instead of χαριτι, there is χωρις: "far off." And then it turns out that Christ tasted death "far from God", "outside of God" (and this apostolic verse brings to mind the cry of the Savior on Golgotha: "My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?!") [3]. He, Jesus, alone was forsaken by God, so that none of us would be left alone with death anymore...

Another example of a variant reading is Christ's prayer at the Last Supper: "Holy Father! keep them in Thy name, those whom Thou hast given Me!" (John 17:11, cf. 17:12). In the Synodal Russian translation, these words are understood by the translators as the transfer of the apostles from the Father to the Son. However, a number of manuscripts, on which some modern translations of the Gospel are based, do not contain the reading "given" (ους δε0δωκα0ς; indeed, this phrase can only refer to the disciples), but "given" ( δεδωκας, i.e. the singular neuter gender), and in this writing Christ speaks precisely of the fact that the Father gave His name to the Son: "Holy Father! keep them in Thy name, which Thou hast given Me!" Contextually more logical is the translation that speaks of the transfer of the name of the Father to the Son: after all, in Phil. 2:9-11 the Apostle says that "God <... > gave Him a name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is to the glory of God the Father"[5]. The son "hath inherited a most glorious name" (see Heb. 1:4). Such reading destroys all the constructions of Jehovah's Witnesses, for it turns out that it was His Name, that is, the name of Jehovah, that the Father gave to the Son.

In the oldest manuscripts of Scripture there are no word splits, no punctuation marks, and no capital letters. For example, how to read: "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord" (Matt. 3:3) or "The voice of one crying: In the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord" (Isaiah 40:3)[6]? In the first case, we hear a man who shouts from the desert, far from the cities, to the townspeople: "Hey, you, there, in the cities! Get ready: the Lord is coming!" In the second case, it is a voice that resounds in the city square and calls to come out of the cities, from the receptacles of sin and vulgarity, and in the desert, naked from the dilapidated garments of culture, to meet the Creator of the worlds. Depending on the location of the punctuation mark, the meaning changes quite significantly...

Where do I write a capital letter? To capitalize or not to capitalize Pauline's verse: "Our gospel <... > closed <... > for unbelievers, whose minds have been blinded by the God of this world" (2 Corinthians 4:3-4)? The Synodal translation believes that the "god of this world" is Satan. (And he does this to the great joy of the Jehovah's Witnesses, who thereby get an example of the application of the word "God" to a being who is not a god, and draw their own conclusion: since the fallen angel is called God, then all the more so the calling of Christ God does not mean that He really is God.) And at the end of the second century, St. Irenaeus of Lyons read as follows: "Among the unbelievers of this world, God has blinded the minds" (Against Heresies, 3, 7, 1).

Secondly, we should not forget that we work mostly with Bible translations. Protestants, like all other Christians, do not preach the Gospel in ancient Greek or ancient Greeks. This means that they are based on some translations.

Translators could deal with different manuscripts, that is, with different versions of the original source (which is especially important for the study of the history of the Old Testament text): "If the edition of the Seventy (Septuagint) had remained pure and in the form in which it was translated into Greek, then it would have been superfluous to translate the Hebrew books into Latin. But since different copies are now in circulation in different countries, and that authentic and ancient translation is corrupted and damaged... the Jews laugh at us" (Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, 2:28)[7].

But the main thing is that any translation is already an interpretation. Any word of a foreign language can be translated with several words of the translator's language. Which of the range of meanings of this word was used in this particular case? — The translator must guess about this (and substantiate his guess). Unfortunately. His guesses are not always indisputable, they are not always correct.

Here is an example of such a translation, which rather generates perplexities than resolves them[8]. In the Russian translation of Col. 2:13-14 says: "You who were dead He made alive with Him, forgiving us all our sins, having destroyed by teaching the handwriting that was about us, which was against us." With such a translation, a purely theosophical, gnostic thought is obtained: the teaching enlivens us, the teaching of Christ cleanses us from the handwriting of sin. It is not Christ's sacrifice that saves, but His preaching (or our agreement with His teaching, which borders on self-purification and self-salvation). The "teaching" (δογμασιν) does not refer to us or to Christ, but to the manuscript: the handwriting as a promissory note "was drawn up in the form of certain precise decrees; τοι δογμασιν in Russian is translated inaccurately"[9]. Modern translations into European languages confirm the validity of this approach[10].

The work of a translator is creative work. And computer translation, precisely because it is automatic, is still inferior to the work of a human translator. The desire to make a tracing paper, a literal-interlinear translation sometimes makes the text not only incomprehensible, but even gives it a completely false meaning. To this day, many Orthodox are confused by the Church Slavonic translation of the parable of the sower: "Then the devil cometh and puts the word out of their hearts, that they that have not believed may be saved" (Luke 8:12). The priest reads this Gospel passage in Slavonic, and immediately begins a sermon... And sometimes very "dialectical" interpretations are born: they say, if a person believed, but sinned, then he could not be saved, and if he did not believe, then he would not be judged so harshly, and therefore he could be saved as a pagan. And even the fact that these words actually express the desire of the tempter is somehow not taken into account... The Slavonic translation only literally conveys the Greek construction. The Synodal Russian translation seems to give the opposite text: "lest they believe and be saved"; The Greek construction, on the other hand, has the same meaning, but uses the possibility in Greek grammar in which one negative particle refers to two verbs at once, or rather, to each of them. The Slavonic translator knew this construction, he wanted to graft it on the Slavic language, but it did not take root here, and as a result, the text of this verse became blasphemous and incomprehensible.

But not only grammar is fraught with surprises for the translator. A theologian-translator cannot but take into account that any word has many meanings, which means that translation is a choice between meanings. For example, the Hebrew word haman means both knowledge and faith. In what case how to translate it? The Hebrew word alma "young woman" can mean both a girl and a young married woman. When the prophet Isaiah declares: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son" (Isaiah 7:14), does he mean an ordinary birth by an ordinary young wife, or does he connect the change in the fate of the world and Israel with the miracle of the Virgin Mother? A Jewish journalist from Moscow offers the correct translation, from his point of view: "Look, this young woman is pregnant." The only thing that is not clear is why the prophet had to proclaim a fact so commonplace, as something important and encouraging. So it's a matter of choosing a general meaning and the corresponding meaning of a single word.

And how to translate it in such a way that it is understandable to people of other cultures? For example, in the Bible, the word "flesh" is not always the antonym of "soul"; Most often it simply means a specific living being. Hence expressions like: "I am the Lord, the God of all flesh" (Jeremiah 32:27); "All flesh shall know that I am the Lord" (Isaiah 49:26); "All flesh shall come before me to worship" (Isaiah 66:23). But in the language of Greek philosophy, the word "flesh" had clearly defined antonyms: "spirit", "soul", "mind". Not noticing this distinction, the talented Orthodox theologian of the mid-fourth century, Apollinarius, fell into a trap: he took the Apostle John's expression "and the Word became flesh" as an assertion that Christ did not have a human soul... And he turned out to be a heretic.

Another example of the influence of the difference of not just cultures, but epochs on the translation and perception of the biblical text: Ap. Paul writes that we now contemplate the mysteries of the Kingdom of Christ "as in a mirror" (the Slavonic translation here is again literally accurate: "as a mirror"). And the Russian Synodal translation says, "as through a glass darkly" (1 Corinthians 13:12). In the perception of a modern person, these are exactly opposite things. To say that I see as in a mirror is reflected as in a mirror is to recognize the highest certainty of observation. And "as through a glass darkly" means precisely divination, presumption, inaccuracy of the visible picture. The context of the Apostolic Epistle inclines to the second reading: "We see as if in divination, as through a glass darkly." But in the Greek text there is still a mirror. Everything becomes clear only if we remember that in ancient times mirrors were not ours, "Venetian", but metal, conveying a very approximate and rather distorted image. Therefore, at that time, the expression "reflected as in a mirror" meant precisely – with inevitable distortions. The Russian translator correctly conveyed the meaning of this expression, sacrificing literal philological accuracy for this purpose.

And the work of translating the Gospel into the languages of other, non-biblical and non-European cultures goes completely beyond the scope of working with a dictionary. Translators of the Gospels into Chinese, for example, have concluded that the only way to translate John's famous verse, "In the beginning was the Word," is to write "In the beginning was the Tao," using the Taoist name for the life principle that governs the world.

And how to translate "I am the Bread of Life" for peoples who do not eat wheat bread and live only on rice? Bread is served there only in restaurants for Europeans, and therefore for the Chinese the literal translated "I am the bread of life" sounds the same as for the Russian "I am the hamburger of life". I had to translate it according to the meaning, not the dictionary: "I am the Rice of Life."