Month: February 2023

Sellers on translating Colossians

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992)

Rather than let February slip away without at least one post, I’m reproducing Otis Q. Sellers’s thoughts on how he went about translating a portion of Scripture, in this case Paul’s letter to the Colossians. His verse-by-verse commentary is available in his tape library, TL081-TL087. (Go to this page of his site.) Here’s my lightly edited transcription of TL081 (from about the 16:00 mark to about 21:33).

 

On Translating Colossians

When we get into this, we want to do the research. We want to see if we can come to some understanding of what is meant by the actual words here. For thousands have made a study of Colossians as far as the King James Version is concerned without any reference to the original Greek. But those who desire the knowledge of what Paul said, and not just a version of what he said, they’re forced to go back of its renderings. They’re forced to go back and consider the Greek text.

Some will do this and come to a conclusion concerning a few words, and thus a word here and there is straightened out. Others may give careful consideration of every word in the Greek text and come to certain conclusions concerning all of them. These conclusions concerning single words will then be linked together, and they can form phrases and sentences.

I have given such consideration, to every word in the Greek text of Colossians. The result is what I will present to you in an honest attempt to tell you what Paul meant by what he said when he wrote this epistle. In the past two centuries, an almost unbelievable amount of Biblical expository material has been put into print since the King James Version was translated. The research worker can find on his shelves page after page of the most critical discussion that covers every one of the more than fifty-five hundred Greek words that are found in the New Testament, including the proper names.

I look about my study here; I’m surrounded on two sides by books, and in them I can find the discussion of every single Greek word in the New Testament on which some man has concentrated and done the work. Every important word in Colossians has been discussed at great length by men whose goal was to get at its meaning. Some of this material is nothing more than one man just seeking to step into the footprints of those who have preceded him.

But some of it will be found to be the efforts of men who have made the most minute inquiry; their findings are of great value. When I think of the works of men like Herman Cremer and of Moulton and Milligan, and when I think of Thayer, then I’m setting forth examples of this. I will draw freely upon the labors of such men. But, when it comes to the final analysis, the conclusions as to what this word means has to strictly be my own.

What I do, as a rule, is to take each word in the Greek and write it a vertical column, one word after another—the big words, the little words—in a vertical column. Then in a parallel column, I take the word and parse it. I check all the authorities in doing this to make sure that I do not go wrong. We can parse these words. We’ll know whether it’s past or present or future; we’ll know if the verb is in the aorist tense or not. A number of authorities have worked on these; we can check one authority against the other. Then in the third column after I have done this, I give a tentative English rendering.

Every word has to be checked in every possible way a word can be checked, with supreme consideration given to the use of the word in other passages in the New Testament. Then I also give due consideration to the translations that have been made by others. In working on Colossians I am sure I have referred to at least 25 different versions of the Colossians epistle; I would say about the same number of commentaries have been searched for material that may be of value in translating and interpreting this epistle.

The commentaries as a rule are a little disappointing, but we find also that sometimes a commentator has made a drive for the truth; it’s just evident that he went into this word, and not repeating something that was said before (although it’s good to repeat things said before if those things prove to be true). All of that is brought together, and this is what we give to you as being the meaning of what was said in the Greek when Paul wrote Colossians.

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For a detailed written example of the application of the precepts, see Sellers’s work on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in six issues of Seed & Bread SB058-SB063.

I hope to have more substantial posts next month.

Links to other posts on Otis Q. Sellers