All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before He made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in His eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into His own family by bringing us to Himself through Jesus Christ. This is what He wanted to do, and it gave Him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace He has poured out on us who belong to His dear Son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that He purchased our freedom with the blood of His Son and forgave our sins. He has showered His kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding. God has now revealed to us His mysterious plan regarding Christ, a plan to fulfil His own good pleasure. And this is the plan: At the right time He will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth. Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for He chose us in advance, and He makes everything work out according to His plan. God’s purpose was that we Jews who were the first to trust in Christ would bring praise and glory to God. And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, He identified you as His own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom He promised long ago. The Spirit is God’s guarantee that He will give us the inheritance He promised and that He has purchased us to be His own people. He did this so we would praise and glorify Him.
Ephesians 1:3-14
What we are going to do is apply Propositional Analysis but we are going to call it Gluing the Bits Together so none of us get scared and think we can’t do this. In essence we have a complicated sentence in that Paul’s thought tumbles over itself to find expression. We have to sort out the pieces and determine which propositions (read “thoughts”) go with what. How does this verse (part of the sentence) connect with that verse (part of the sentence). To get started with a complex sentence like this we need to pay careful attention to the seams, the boundaries between thoughts, the joints between verses. To do that we have to use versions which have left the long sentence intact and not tried to divide up the sentence in (seemingly) unconnected ways.
We must therefore use the versions (or the Greek original) which treat it as a whole and not divide it up for us. So we need to use the ASV, BBE, LITV, RV, YLT, MKJV or Webster’s translation. These are the versions which have left the sentence intact as one whole and have not decided for us how it is broken up. Furthermore we have to understand the difference between translations to chose which versions to select in our comparison. There are basically three types of translations:
Literal Translations which follow as closely as possible to the original text, using words that mean the same as the original text. Literal translations follow the sentence structure and word order of the originial, including idioms and historical anachronisms.
Dynamic Equivalence Translations which translate the words including the idioms and the meaning of the original text into the most appropriate natural form of the receptor language including even changing the words and structure of the sentence in the target language if necessary.
Free Translations which translate words and idioms in the most colloquial, natural form of the receptor language but are not necessarily intent on preserving all the meaning of the original. As a result accuracy can be lost or a portion of meaning of the original be omitted. Often a sense of the text can be lost in the attempt to express one particular nuance of the original text.
I would suggest that you chose one from each category. I would also suggest you chose at least one translation which doesn’t preserve the passage as one sentence but has divided it for you. So you have a comparison to make at that level as well. Does it sound complicated? How will you juggle all this comparison going on? Easy – use E-Sword. The new version of E-Sword allows you to load eight different translations in the parallel window. Just click the “Parallel” button on the top right of your E-Sword screen. Notice that you are in control of which translations you load into that window. We don’t have to fill all eight. In fact if you do the text becomes harder to read because in older versions of E-Sword the columns are skinnier whereas in the new version the others are shifted off screen.
I recommend you load one Literal version, I have chosen the LITV. One Dynamic Equivalence version (I chose BBE) and one in the middle. I chose the RV. I added to that some dynamic equivalence versions that divide the text into a number of sentences. The best which also maintains that linkage between segments is God’s Word version. To that I added the NLT because that is the version I use most frequently in English. To that I have added the Greek New Testament. If you don’t know Greek you could add the GNT-BYZ+ version which allows you to pass your cursor over a word and it will pop up with the definitions or meanings of the words from the lexicon. Now you are all set to go.
One last comment I have arranged my versions in the parallel window to move from literal to Dynamic Equivalence to Free Translations then add the Greek on the right hand side. Just to have a flow to the way it is laid out. It helps keep in mind the schema as I work. Enough said in getting you started. Now to work. Spend some time seeing how the pieces fit together before we even start. Look at the big picture first.
Keep pressing on, believing who you are in Christ. Don’t be satisfied with anything less than all you can be.
Joyce Meyer
Jesus became what we are that he might make us what he is.
Athenasius of Alexandria
Ministry is when you point people to Jesus, then they leave YOU to follow HIM!
Anon