The Voice, part 2

As I wrote about here, it seems that my emerging friends have a new Bible translation on the market. Aside from the fact that the very last thing I think we need is yet another Bible translation, I have a problem...

I strolled over to the website recently [note: it works better in IE, sorry!] and found a side-by-side comparison chart of the Voice with three other translations (the Message, the ESV and the TNIV). One of the passages they chose for comparison was Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. The NET (which, not incidentally, I really like) reads this way:

"Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After he fasted forty days and forty nights he was famished. The tempter came and said to him..." Matt 4:1-3a

Fair enough; a fine translation.

The Voice reads this way:

"The Spirit then led Jesus into the desert to be tempted by the devil. Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. After this fast, He was, as you can imagine, hungry. But He was also curiously stronger because of His fast. And so He was able to withstand the devil, the tempter, when he came to Jesus."

Houston, we have a problem. I'm okay with the concept of dynamic equivalency. I'm okay with a Bible inserting explanatory information within the body of the text, to a point. But did you notice the huge running commentary inserted into the Voice?! To their credit, it's italicized (the oft misunderstood standard for this kind of translational work). But that's little solace to a guy like me that feels the reader - not the editors of a particular translation - should bear the primary responsibility for interpretation.

Who's to say that Jesus' strength was "curious"? Why does the translation call for the quaint little insertion "as you can imagine"? How do we know that it was "because of his fast" that He was strong? What's the value of a comparative (strongerer) when it comes to Jesus?

These and more questions are raised by the Voice's translation. As a rule, any translation that raises more questions than it answers should be viewed with skepticism, no?

So while I've read precisely two passages from this new translation now, I'm very skeptical at this point.

What say you?

Hatushili