YES Jesus IS the first and only totally reliable translation!

Jesus is the Word of God, not the work of man. A translation, by definition, is a work of people, retelling the meaning of Scripture in a target language. If you call Jesus Christ a 'translation,' you're changing the definition of translation.

Jesus is the Word of God, not the work of man. A translation, by definition, is a work of people, retelling the meaning of Scripture in a target language. If you call Jesus Christ a 'translation,' you're changing the definition of translation.

I think Jesus is the truth(the logos) and the message. I don't know about the translatability of Jesus and His Message. We were instructed to be his 'martyre' which is mandatory, while translation can be optional I guess. We can study the Bible in Greek and Hebrew and teach people Greek and Hebrew to understand more about him through the original language and the history/land of the Bible, which the Ronings and others are doing. :) Studying the text of the Bible was not possible for the most of the ordinary people in the early century. Studying Biblical languages was not possible for most of us in last century. How will the technology and the awareness of the significance of Biblical languages and the limitation of translations make the differences?

Point well taken.

I was stretching the definition of "translation" unfairly in the sense that the Eternal Word was being expressed in a way that we humans can understand, i.e., in human form.

We are better off sticking with "in-fleshed/incarnation" for that divine act, and limiting translation, as you say, to our efforts in human verbalizations to point faithfully to the WORD, to JESUS.

I actually think there is something to be said for the idea of the Eternal Son of God being "translated" into human nature at the Incarnation. This does not necessarily change the definition of translation (in the sense of "changing" or "converting" into, e.g. "translating" a dream into reality). It is rather a question of understanding "translation" in its wider sense, at least in English.

I think it was in a book by Lamin Sanneh where I first encountered the concept of Jesus as a "translation". Unfortunately, this was nearly 30 years ago, so I don't recall the title of the book. If my memory serves me right, Sanneh also makes the point that all translation (including "translating" or incarnating the gospel into words and acts in our daily lives) is rooted in this event. I think his point was also that Christians have never been against translating their Scriptures, unlike adherents of other religions, whose view of their Scriptures does approach the realm of the magical. The rather unique Christian perspective exists exactly because- to put it crudely - God started it by "translating" Himself into humanity. Ever since, Christians have been "translating" the Word of God in the widest possible sense, including expressing the message of Scripture in other languages.

Personally, I am quite taken with Halvor's first thought and Manie's defence of it. If translation is taken to be taking a message and putting it in a form which the recipient can understand, surely the incarnation qualifies? It is much more, of course, but for me the translation perspective helps build the picture.

As to the centrality of subsequent further translation, a witness is useless if nobody can understand him. It very soon became a problem; Jesus' teaching in the gospels was presumably in Aramaic or Hebrew but we only have it in translation. Although I personally suspect Jesus spoke more than adequate Greek, that's not really relevant.

If Jesus is the translation, are we paraphrasing? What else do we need to translate? What is the message that Jesus is translating? Have we missed the point or the key message that we should and need to translate? What different are we going to make by printing out and distributed the translation of 6000+ languages? Or simply follow him to be the translation of the Translation.