Sid: I have Bill Morford on the telephone, and you might recall I interviewed him several years ago, and we made available a fresh translation of the New Covenant called the “The Power New Testament.” And it was so successful that Bill and I have discussions that we really need available to our Mishpochah an entire Bible with the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament all together. And I knew of an approved Jewish Translation that was in the public domain published by the Hebrew Bible society. And he checked into it and he’s finally put it all together. Now you might say why does the world need a new translation of the Bible? We have so many translations, it’s because this one is different. There are several things that makes it different. First of all, the power of the Greek New Testament was high jacked? Now Bill Morford why in your opinion was the power from the translation high jacked in the other Bibles, but not in yours? Why?
Bill: Because the scholars who are always appointed to do official translation are appointed for their scholarship not because of their relationship with the living God and they simply don’t know and that’s one of the reasons. They don’t look on God to heal them; they don’t look to the Lord to deliver them from other spirits that are plaguing them and their simply unaware of the power that’s there. Plus they use tradition, they know how it’s been translated in the past and they make minor changes as they do new translations.
Sid: But let’s go back to the King James that some people think is the language that Jesus spoke in, but was there prejudice there against power?
Bill: Yes, all the way back.
Sid: Because these people were not walking in intimacy with God or all the gifts of the Spirit. Because you have some of the…. For instance, I don’t know if this is the best example, but in Mark 11:23, 24, “Truly I say to you that whoever would say to this mountain, ‘You must immediately be removed and you must immediately be cast into the sea,’ and would not doubt in his heart but would believe what he is saying is happening, it shall be to him. Because of this I say to you, you must continually pray for everything, then for whatever you are asking, believe that you have taken it, and it will be there for you.” Bill, I love it where you say believe that you have taken it. That’s the type of thing you mean by a restoration of the power of the words of the Messiah and the whole new covenant.
Bill: That’s right and it’s amazing to me how many times the scholars translate the words take they translate as receive.
Sid: So you’ve restored the power that was normally neglected by the translators. The next thing you did is you restored the Jewish roots. Now when the New Testament was written it was written for Jews by Jews in a Jewish time, and so a lot of things were taken for granted and not necessary to bring out. As a result because it wasn’t brought out literally the Jewish culture was high jacked and the Christian which, and originally started with a pagan culture was incorporated because everyone needs culture. And today we think that the culture that was incorporated was what it was when the Bible was originally written, but it wasn’t. Now in 1984 you went to Israel and that’s when God started giving revelation about what we’re talking about, tell me about that.
Bill: Oh that was exciting. Wherever we went I would see things that, of course we were with a Christian tour looking for Christian things, but I’d see the Jewishness behind them. And when we came back was when I really started dig deeply into the languages.
Sid: Well, you’ve studied Greek, you’ve studied Hebrew, tell me who you studied Greek under.
Bill: Arnold Goss is his name; he was on the faculty at Columbia Bible College, which is now Columbia International University. He has a P.H.D. in Greek, and he was a personal tutor for me for well over three years.
Sid: And then who did you study Hebrew under?
Bill: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who is an awesome scholar, he too has a P.H.D.
Sid: Now when I hear his name I don’t think of him, I think of his Grandfather, who is credited as the man that restored the language of Hebrew to Israel, the spoken language.
Bill: That’s right.
Sid: If I was to pick one person on planet earth to be mentored under it would be Rabbi Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.
Bill: Yeah, it was the Lord that put us in the right place at the right time. He moved us to Lakeland, Florida in 1993 and we didn’t know a soul there, we just felt that’s where we were supposed to be. And one month after getting there I was just as usual taking one hour early in the morning to translate Greek so I wouldn’t forget what I had learned and the Lord told me I had to get serious with it. So I looked around first for a Messianic Rabbi, and there was none. So I went to the only synagogue in town.
Sid: What kind of synagogue was it?
Bill: It was a Conservative Jewish synagogue, and the rabbi there was there was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and he invited me immediately to attend his classes that he was teaching. And recommended a number of reference books to me, which I got right way, because I knew that there were so many Hebrew idioms and Jewish customs in the Greek that were intact there that I need help to be able to properly translate them. And the rabbi gave me a huge, list which I got, and then I attended his classes and had a lot of personal time with him. We met several times a week and it was just amazing, every question I had he could answer.
Sid: Now how many years would you say you have invested of your life for this brand new translation called “The One New Man Bible”, which includes the Power New Testament and the Hebrew scriptures, I might add the approved Hebrew Scriptures, and the Revised Power New Testament, and you call it now the “One New Man Bible.” How many years did you put into that?
Bill: About twelve years full time work, and the last seven years, it was more than seven years ago that I first got the Jewish translation that I used as base for this. It’s been a long time and it’s of course restricted my ministry we had a traveling ministry, but I haven’t been able to travel much. Last year I had a total of three services at different churches.
Sid: Well, let me take you okay, so you actually put in over twenty years, twelve years full time in this project. Now another thing you deal with that other Bibles don’t deal with and that is idioms, what is an idiom?
Bill: Well, an idiom that we like in this country is that “it’s raining cats and dogs” and we know what it means, or we say “it’s a gully washer.” But somebody who speaks a foreign language and just starting to speak English and hears that “it’s raining cats and dogs” and they look out expecting to see small animals coming out of the sky, but that’s not what it talks about.
Sid: And if you don’t understand the Hebrew idioms when it talks about removing your eye someone’s going to think literally that they are going to remove their eye. When I read that I wondered what it was because even though I come from an Orthodox Jewish background I didn’t know these idioms because they were from 2,000 years ago.
Bill: Right and what we have to do is interpret the Biblical languages for what the authors of them meant in them.
Sid: Now you also deal with what you call, correcting the tenses, why did the tenses have to be corrected in the Bible?
Bill: That’s a mystery to me why they’re not translated properly. And one of my favorites is the Aaronic blessing, which is not may the Lord bless, you but it’s the Lord will keep you.
Sid: Well, that’s so much better when the tense is corrected.
Bill: Right.
