There’s no getting around the eventual discussion of languages and related issues when it comes to the Bible.

• It was originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. So from the outset the Bible itself is multi-lingual.
  
  
• “Written” is a key word here because many of the individuals and people groups documented in the Bible spoke in languages other than the 3 languages it was written in or were often multi-lingual themselves. For instance, Jesus spoke in Aramaic but His words are captured by the Gospels writers in Greek.
  
  
• Every language changes over time. (Compare Shakespearian English with today’s rendition.) This is why the names of some people and places seem to “change” from book to book. They’re merely the new pronunciations or renderings as the language has changed in every day usage over hundreds and hundreds of years. (Take the word “frontier”–depending on the time of its usage in U.S. history it could mean anything from western Pennsylvania to Kentucky to everything west of St. Louis. You have to know the time when it is used to know to which of these geographic regions it describes.) The books of the Bible were written over a span of approximately 1,500 years so even the same language will change a bit from one generation to the next.
  
  
• The Jews of Israel in Jesus’ time weren’t speaking the exact same language Abraham or even Moses spoke. This is due in large part to Israel’s conquests of nations and groups around her–thus assimilating some of their language into her own–and being conquered by others and being given over to the language of each ruler. (Just the captivity in Babylon alone completely changed the daily language embraced by Jews from that point on.) Even though Aramaic was the Jewish “homeland” language of Jesus’ day, Greek had become so prevalent throughout the world and in Israel that the Jewish authorities themselves translated the Old Testament into Greek by Jesus’ time. (We call it “The Septuagint” and it’s the translation New Testament authors quote. Even they are quoting the Bible translated into another language other than its original. That should be a lesson for all of us in this discussion.)
  
  
• Even before the very first edition of the King James version of the Bible was released there was already vast numbers of translations in existence in a myriad of languages. Some of the most authoritative, earliest versions of the Bible are in a wide variety of languages such as Syriac, not to mention the later Latin Vulgate upon which many versions are based.

So the point is that we really do need academia to continue to study these languages and render translations for us. But it’s worth noting that translating the Bible into other languages has been a staple of activity carried out before the church was even formed and continued LONG before it arrived in even the earliest English version. Many generations of Believers have embarked on updating translations to make them more relevant due to centuries of changes in their own languages.