Putting to Test the Recovery Version

[UntoHim]

Originally Posted by Ohio

The poster here ZNPaaneah has mentioned on several occasions that he personnaly knew the translators of the RecVers, and that from the very beginning the RecVers was little more than a plagiarizing of the ASV 1901, with semantic updates. None of them were qualified for the work, which is why none of them dared to list their names.

Actually the translators of the original New Testament Recovery Version (circa 1985) were indeed listed on the opening pages. I have a copy in my office and the translators are listed as "John C. Ingalls, Bill Duane, Albert Knoch, Witness Lee". It is my understanding that Duane did have an advanced degree in biblical Greek. I believe Knock's grandfather was a biblical translator (could have been an uncle or other relative). I think Ingalls was a self-taught student of biblical Greek (I may be wrong on this). Of course Witness Lee had absolutely zero former training of any sort and had no business being listed as a translator.

I think the notion of plagiarizing the ASV is to grossly mischaracterize the efforts of the translators of the Recovery Version New Testament, with the exception of Lee having his name included as a translator, which was a joke. I'm no Greek scholar, but I studied under several and most of them have noted that the Recovery Version NT seems to follow the New American Standard Version more than any other modern translation, however this could simply be a matter of the translators having the same inclination to use certain methods of translation as others.

Originally Posted by testallthings

The RcV Bible claims to be the best translation with the best footnotes. What I want to find out, and here I ask the help of the readers and members of this forum, is to test and see if these things are true.

Actually the Recovery Version NT is a fairly good modern translation, although it tends to be unnecessarily literal at times. For example John 7:39 is rendered as "But this He said concerning the Spirit, whom those who believed into Him were about to receive; for the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified." Almost all modern English translations render it "for as yet the Spirit had not been given" (ESV and many others) To those of us familiar with Witness Lee's teaching of "Jesus becoming the life-giving Spirit", the reasons for this rendering are obvious - Lee wanted as many proof-texts as possible to back up his unorthodox, modalisitc teachings regarding the Trinity. So I'm assuming he talked the translators into making this linguistically awkward translation.

At other times the Recovery Version NT wanders far afield from being faithful to the orthodox understanding of certain key Greek words/terms. One glaring example would be the Recovery Version's rendering of the Greek word ἀλήθεια (alētheia) in John 16, which has been rendered universally as "truth", but is rendered as "reality" in the Recovery Version, where John 16:13 comes out as "But when He, the Spirit of reality, comes, He will guide you into all the reality; for He will not speak from Himself, but what He hears He will speak; and He will declare to you the things that are coming". Here again we see the undue influence of Witness Lee, who had absolutely no business being a significant influence among the translators.

So the bottom line is that the Recovery Version NT is a decent translation, with there being a limited number of examples where Witness Lee did have some undue influence. Of course the main problem with the Recovery Version is that nearly 50 percent of the text is the footnotes, which contain many of the questionable teachings of Witness Lee.