Suzanne McCarthy, in her Open Letter to John Piper, mentions his famous (infamous?) video clip of a sermon where he criticizes the TNIV for not translating all the words. (There is a link to it in her post.) Today on Koinonia, William Mounce writes a post titled Words, and the Word of God—γαρ (Monday with Mounce 49) where he brings up basically the same subject.

(I like Piper when he isn’t talking about translations or tornadoes.)

One reminded me of the other so I thought I would put them together.

If you want an example of a translation that does translate the Greek word γαρ (gar) often, take a look at 1 Corinthians 1:17-31 in the ESV and you’ll find the word for used a whole lot to the point of sounding rather annoying.

Tangent:
On the word for, I wish translations would use the word because more often. Even the NLT uses the word for pretty often. In reading through John in the NLT (which was great–both the book and the translation), I realized that the NLT uses more formal language than I previously realized. They use the word for a lot where it isn’t what most of us would use in conversation. There are many scholars who write this way, some of whom were on the translation committee of the NLT (Moo and Schreiner) but I always wonder if they speak this way too.

This is probably a bad example but compare:
“I went to the store, for I needed food.”
“I went to the store because I needed food.”
Multiple sentences are needed for a good example but that gives you an idea of what I think it sounds like when for is used all the time.

But again it was great to read John for the first time in the NLT.

Comments welcome.