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Quoting Scripture Responsibly: Translation and Context

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Quoting Scripture Responsibly: Translation and Context

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Quoting a single line of scripture carries two risks that a longer excerpt mostly avoids. The first is translation: a short passage read in one language rarely maps onto a single unambiguous meaning in another, and scholars working from the original languages routinely disagree about how a given line should be rendered, which is why textual criticism, the discipline of comparing surviving manuscripts and editions to establish the most reliable reading, exists as a field in its own right rather than an afterthought to translation.

The second risk is context. A line lifted out of the passage surrounding it can read very differently than it does inside its original argument or narrative, and traditions themselves frequently dispute how a much cited line should be read once its neighboring verses are restored. A responsible citation names its translation and edition, states plainly where the line sits within the larger text, and does not let a short quotation stand in for a claim about what the whole work teaches.

Different traditions also hold different views on whether their own scripture can be adequately rendered in translation at all, some treating a translation as functionally equivalent to the source and others holding that only the original language carries full authority, and a careful passage entry notes that difference rather than treating every translation as interchangeable with the text it renders.

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Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
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