The New CSB Note at 2 Peter 3.10

Last night in class, the students and I were talking about how changes in the NA28 might affect English translations. So I pulled up 2 Peter 3.10 in the CSB as an example. I wrote about this note before and criticized it for being misleading. Lo and behold, the CSB has updated the note with what appears to be perhaps the first Bible footnote taken from an ETC blog post! I can’t be sure, of course, but the evidence looks compelling.

The old note at 2 Peter 3.10 said “Or will not be found” which read as if it was saying “some Greek mss read...” which is, of course, not the case. Now it says “Some Syriac and Coptic mss read will not be found.” That’s much better.

Here’s my ETC post.

And here’s the new CSB note.

Curiously, this change is not noted in the official list of changes in the CSB 2020 revision. But it certainly is a change from what I found in 2017.

Ozoliņš: Observations on ESV Old Testament Translation Notes

The following is a guest post from Kaspars Ozoliņš who has a PhD from UCLA in Indo-European linguistics and currently works as a Research Associate at Tyndale House in Cambridge.

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Translation notes are a time-honoured tradition in biblical translation. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the preface “To the Reader” of the 1611 KJV:

[I]t hath pleaſed God in his divine prouidence, heere and there to ſcatter wordes and ſentences of that difficultie and doubtfulneſſe, not in doctrinall points that concerne ſaluation, (for in ſuch it hath beene uouched that the ſcriptures are plaine) but in matters of leſſe moment…Now in ſuch a caſe, doth not a margine do well to admoniſh the Reader to ſeeke further, and not to conclude or dogmatize upon this or that peremptorily?…They that are wiſe, had rather haue their judgements at libertie in differences of readings, then to be captiuated to one, when it may be the other.

Translation notes are in fact a very useful tool for expanding and clarifying particular words and passages, given the many complications involved in transferring the meaning of ancient texts written in languages generally unfamiliar to the reader. The NET version excels at this, containing no fewer than 60,932 translation notes. But such an abundance of information raises an important question. What are the intended audience(s) for such notes, and therefore, what kind of information ought to be included?

This question is especially germane to notes of a text-critical nature. Naturally, the academic or pastor will consult standard critical editions of the biblical text for information about variant readings for a given passage. So it would seem that text-critical notes in an English Bible are not aimed at such an individual, at least not directly. On the other hand, what purpose could be fulfilled by supplying a layperson with variant manuscript and versional readings?

Of course, the obvious answer is that some variants ultimately make a difference, especially when dealing with an inspired text. To that end, anyone engaging with the biblical text should take at least some interest in important variant readings. Text-critical notes in translated versions should be a kind of bare-bones apparatus presenting the most important variant readings which are exegetically significant and difficult to evaluate (i.e., valuable and viable).