The Translator Is Not a Prophet

A translator may labor with reverence, learning, prayer, and remarkable providential help. He remains a translator.

That statement is not an insult. Translation is one of the great ministries by which God gives the written Word to nations that do not know Hebrew and Greek. The Church owes an immense debt to faithful translators. Their work fills pulpits, homes, schools, prisons, and mission fields with Scripture.

The honor of the office does not change the office.

A prophet receives and writes the words God gives under the immediate work of the Holy Ghost. A translator receives an already written text and renders it in another language by learning, judgment, and skill. If those acts are confused, every unusually successful rendering becomes a candidate for new revelation.

The proposition of this article is:

Faithful translation is a ministerial work under inspired Scripture. It truly communicates the Word of God, but it neither repeats the act of inspiration nor grants the translator authority to alter the source.

This distinction guards the Authorized Version from Ruckmanism and the Hebrew Old Testament from Septuagintal supremacy at the same time.

Different Offices Serve One Word

The written Word passes through several kinds of human labor. Each has a proper object and limit.

All five may be used by God. Only the first produces Scripture by immediate inspiration.

This explains why an error in one office does not destroy the Word served by that office. A preacher may misspeak without making the Bible false. A printer may omit a word without erasing it from Scripture. A translator may choose a less exact phrase without receiving authority to correct Hebrew or Greek.

The text is prior to the service.

Inspiration Is Not Excellence

Modern speech often uses inspired loosely. A beautiful poem is inspired. A composer gives an inspired performance. A preacher feels inspired to choose a text.

Scripture uses the category more strictly.

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Tim. 3:16). The word identifies Scripture as breathed out by God. Peter says that prophecy did not come by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost (2 Pet. 1:20–21).

Inspiration is therefore not the highest point on a sliding scale of literary quality. It is God’s act in giving canonical words through chosen prophets and apostles.

A translation can be more or less accurate, clear, dignified, memorable, and suitable for public worship. The Authorized Version excels in all these respects. None is the definition of immediate inspiration.

If extraordinary quality proved inspiration, the argument would turn upon taste. If unusual providence proved inspiration, every striking historical deliverance could produce a new canonical text. If ecclesiastical use proved inspiration, long reception would make later wording retroactively prophetic.

The doctrine of Scripture permits no such expansion. God gave the words. The translator serves them.

Translation Requires Understanding and Judgment

Translation is not the mechanical replacement of one word with another.

Languages divide experience differently. A Hebrew word may carry a range not matched by one English word. Greek syntax may require English words that have no separate counterpart in the source. Idioms must be understood before they can be rendered. Word order, emphasis, aspect, figures of speech, and context all demand judgment.

The translator therefore asks at least three questions:

1. What does the source text say?
2. What does it mean in this construction and context?
3. What wording in the receiving language communicates that meaning faithfully?

Learning can improve each answer. It cannot make the work prophetic.

Jerome drew the distinction in language Whitaker later used. To be a prophet is one thing; to be an interpreter is another. In the former, the Spirit gives what is to be spoken. In the latter, learning and command of words translate what the interpreter understands.¹

The distinction does not make translation secular. A minister preaches through learning and judgment, yet he should pray for illumination and divine help. A church court judges through fallible deliberation, yet it acts before God. Providence governs all these works.

The error comes when providential service is renamed immediate inspiration.

The Authorized Version Translators Rejected the Confusion

The 1611 preface does not speak as the manifesto of men who believed their English words had become a new source-language Scripture.

The translators defend vernacular Bibles strongly. They affirm that even a translation with imperfections may rightly be called the Word of God. Their king’s-speech analogy shows why: the speaker’s message remains his message when faithfully conveyed in another language.

At the same time, they distinguish interpreters from apostles and prophets. In discussing the Greek translation of the Seventy, they report the high claims made for it and then answer that the Seventy “were Interpreters, they were not Prophets.” They could perform much excellent work as learned men and still stumble as men—by oversight, ignorance, addition, or omission.²

The passage is decisive for two controversies.

First, the AV translators did not believe that a famous translation becomes inspired through excellence or use. They applied the interpreter–prophet distinction even to the ancient Greek version honored by many churches.

Second, the distinction necessarily applies to their own labor. Men who denied prophetic status to the Seventy did not quietly claim it for the companies at Westminster, Cambridge, and Oxford.³

Their preface also says why a new English revision was undertaken. Existing translations contained much that was sound, but what was “not so agreeable to the originall” could be corrected and truth placed instead.⁴ The original judged the translation.

That was their office.

A Translation Can Still Be the Word of God

The denial of translation inspiration sometimes produces an opposite error. If translators are fallible, it is said, their product is merely human. The congregation possesses no Bible until the pastor consults Hebrew and Greek.

The AV preface refuses that conclusion.

The king’s speech does not cease to be his speech when another man faithfully renders it. Differences of grace and exactness in the rendering do not change the identity of the message in its substance. In the same way, the Word translated is rightly called the Word of God.

This authority is derivative without being imaginary.

When the Authorized Version reads, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” the English-speaking Christian hears the Word of God. He need not prepend, “A fallible committee once suggested.” The sentence faithfully communicates Genesis 1:1.

If a question arises over the force of a Hebrew word, however, the English is examined by the Hebrew. The translation does not lose its status as God’s Word when its rendering is checked. Its status depends upon that faithful relation.

The distinction resembles reflected light. Moonlight is real light by which a traveler may see. The moon is not the sun, and it does not illuminate the sun. Its derivative character explains the light rather than denying it.

So with translation. It truly shines because it receives.

Providence Is Not a Second Inspiration

A defender of an inspired translation may retreat from the word inspired and speak instead of supernatural preservation, advanced illumination, or a providentially perfect settlement.

The terms must be defined.

God’s providence governs the smallest events. He prepared the languages, gifts, books, political circumstances, and companies that produced the Authorized Version. He used their work mightily in the English-speaking Church. Confessional bibliology can affirm that providence without embarrassment.

Providence also governed the copying of manuscripts, the work of printers, the translation of Scripture into other languages, and the preservation of innumerable books. Providence does not make every product infallible.

Immediate inspiration answers the question, What words did God breathe out as canonical Scripture? Providence answers the question, How did God govern the history by which his Word was preserved, translated, and used?

Conflate the two, and every providential means threatens to become a new source of revelation.

Keep them distinct, and the glory belongs where it should. The excellence of the Authorized Version magnifies the providence of God in giving faithful servants to his Word. It need not make those servants apostles.

Ruckman’s Open Reversal

Peter Ruckman states the contrary doctrine without disguise.

Chapter 8 of The Christian’s Handbook of Manuscript Evidence is titled “Correcting the Greek With the English.” He announces that the “English readings are superior to the Greek readings.” In discussing John 4:24, he says that the AV reading is “superior to any Greek text.” Near the chapter’s end, he writes: “Moral: Mistakes in the AV 1611 are advanced revelation!”⁵

Those claims pass beyond the defense of a faithful translation.

If an English reading is superior to every Greek text not because it faithfully renders the Greek but because it discloses revelation unavailable in the Greek, English has become a new source. If a mistake can be “advanced revelation,” agreement with the originals is no longer the rule. Departure itself can be canonized.

This is the point at which Ruckmanism and confessional bibliology part company.

Confessional bibliology receives the Authorized Version because it faithfully represents the authentic Hebrew and Greek. Ruckman’s stated method makes the English capable of correcting them. One position preserves the translator’s office. The other turns translation into a second inspiration.

Ruckman is useful here because he says openly what subtler systems imply. Once a translation is allowed to reveal canonical wording unavailable in its source, no principled boundary remains between rendering and revelation.

The Same Error in Greek

The antiquity of a Greek Old Testament translation does not change the office.

Its translator may have been skilled. He may have understood a difficult Hebrew expression correctly. His rendering may preserve ancient Jewish exegesis. He may even have worked from a Hebrew exemplar that differed from the received text at a particular place.

Each claim must be tested.

What cannot be assumed is that his Greek wording possesses prophetic authority because it later appears in Christian Scripture collections or resembles a New Testament quotation.

An inspired New Testament writer may quote, adapt, or freshly render Old Testament language. His wording is inspired as part of the New Testament he writes. That fact does not travel backward and inspire every line of a Greek translation or every reading in a later codex.

The distinction is exact:

• The prophet or apostle writes inspired Scripture.
• The earlier translator renders a source by learning and judgment.
• The later copyist transmits and may alter the Greek.
• The modern editor reconstructs a Greek form from surviving witnesses.

Agreement among any of these is evidence of relation. It is not a transfer of office.

Later articles will examine direction of dependence passage by passage. For now, the constitutional point is enough: a translator does not become a prophet because an apostle uses similar words.

The Strongest Objection

Someone may answer: Could not the Holy Ghost guide a translation so perfectly that it becomes infallible without calling the translators prophets?

The possibility cannot be established by changing the label. An infallible canonical wording, unavailable in or superior to the inspired source, is new revelation in function even if another name is used.

The claimant must produce divine warrant.

Where does Scripture promise a second, independently infallible wording in Greek for the Hebrew Old Testament? Where does it promise an English translation that corrects the Greek New Testament? Where do the Reformed confessions transfer “immediately inspired,” “kept pure,” “authentical,” and “finally to appeal” from Hebrew and Greek to a version?

Providential usefulness is not such a promise. Ecclesiastical reception is not such a promise. Literary excellence is not such a promise.

Without warrant, the claim asks the Church to enlarge the canon of inspired wording through an inference from historical success.

The safer and stronger confession is the one the translators themselves made. The original is true and authoritative. The faithful rendering truly conveys it. The translator may be corrected where he fails to represent it.

Honor the Translator by Preserving His Office

The prophet gives Scripture under the immediate movement of the Holy Ghost. The translator kneels before that Scripture and carries its meaning into another tongue.

The second office is not made honorable by stealing the first.

The Authorized Version deserves defense as a faithful, exact, dignified, and ecclesiastically received English rendering of the preserved Hebrew and Greek. The Greek Old Testament deserves study as an ancient and complex body of translations and textual witnesses. Neither needs to be independently inspired in order to be useful.

Whitaker’s distinction leaves every servant in his proper place. The interpreter translates authentic Scripture. He does not make his translation authentic Scripture.

The next article will set the three great translation supremacies beside one another. Their languages differ. Their inversion is one.

Notes and Further Reading

For the project’s rejection of English-over-originals doctrine, see Chris Thomas, “Confessional Bibliology vs. KJV-Onlyism,” Confessional Bibliology, October 24, 2024.

Previous in the series: “William Whitaker’s Rule for Every Translation.”

Next in the series: “Three Translation Supremacies, One Inversion.”