Words matter. Especially in translation.

When you take a text written in Hebrew or Greek and move it into English something happens in the transition. Sometimes it is clean. The meaning carries across without significant loss. But sometimes — and this is where things get complicated — the translator makes a choice. A theological choice. A choice shaped by their tradition, their era, their assumptions about what the text should say. And that choice becomes the version that gets preached for generations.

I have sat in services where something was stated as biblical truth that did not survive contact with the original language. Where a word that meant one thing in Hebrew became something heavier and more threatening in English because the English version served a particular interpretation better. Where the translation was not wrong by accident. It was wrong by design — shaped to produce a specific response in the listener.

The specific response was usually compliance.

Keep people slightly afraid of God and they are easier to lead. Keep the text a little more threatening than the original warranted and the authority of the person interpreting it becomes harder to question. Who are you to push back on what the Bible says? Even when what the Bible actually says in the original is softer, more generous, more liberating than the version being delivered from the pulpit.

I am not saying translation is conspiracy. Most of it is not. But I am saying that the version of scripture that has reached most pews has been filtered through choices made by people with agendas — sometimes good agendas, sometimes less good ones — and those choices have consequences for how people understand God and themselves.

The person sitting in the pew deserves to know that. They deserve to know that the text is available. That the original languages are accessible. That they are allowed to look for themselves.

That permission is more liberating than most people realize.

Stephon Rudd