I am often asked what the best Bible translation is. My usual reply is that there aren’t any. All translations are biased, they merely differ as to how or where. The best you can do is to read it in the original language (and I teach a course with a lecture on how you can do that). This is because all translation is an interpretation. There is no way to “translate” a text so as to entirely and accurately preserve its original meaning and nuance. You have to always guess or assume at what was meant; some of that guessing or assuming will be tainted by improper assumptions. And even when you get it right, words in one language do not share the same valences (one might say “Venn diagrams of meaning”) as corresponding words in another, so any word you choose in English will carry implications that might not exist in the underlying language—and (importantly) vice versa. Hence, through valence discrepancies, even the best possible translation can both conceal meaning from the source text and add meaning not in the source text. So even after accounting for the role of interpretation in settling on a translation (already an unsolvable problem), that translation might also be in some way misleading, in a way impossible to avoid because English literally “does not have a word” that exactly matches the word it is translating in Greek or Hebrew. A famous example is logos (as in Jn 1:1). No English translation of that is ever spot on, because no such word exists in English. Yet if you don’t read Greek, you might be surprised how many hundreds of times that word appears in the New Testament.

Ironically the Bible is the only ancient text that exists in dozens of translations to be compared, and for which almost all those translations endeavor to be almost word-to-word precise, and for which there are interlinear editions comparing the translation to the underlying language. And yet still bias seeps in. You can pick almost any verse and see the variations. So what do I do? As a rule I will start with something banal and professional like the NIV; but even then I always check it against the original language before trusting it (here is an example of it being correct and most others wrong; here is an example of it being wrong and others correct; Paul Davidson provides a top list of its fails, but you can find as many in any other translation).

To illustrate that this can happen outside biblical studies, and also how translations outside that field tend to be looser even when correct (aiming for literary fit with a modern English ear rather than direct word-for-word translation, unlike the Bible), I will adapt here material from two of my books, abridging the relevant sections and adding commentary on today’s point. All the sources (ancient and modern) you can find in the cited sections of my books.

Did Homer Think Ghosts Could Harm You?

For my Berkeley honors thesis I wrote “Heroic Values in Classical Literary Depictions of the Soul: Heroes and Ghosts in Virgil, Homer, and Tso Ch’iu-ming,” which you can now read in my book Hitler Homer Bible Christ (pp. 31–70; cf. 49–50). I am not entirely confident of its overall thesis now, but the gist is that there seems to have been a link made between ancient cultures’ views of the dead and their views of the hero, and I show this across three distinct cultures—Greek, Roman, and Chinese—using their corresponding “core classics” (the epics they used as a central source text in schools). In the process of studying and collecting the evidence to test my thesis by, I discovered a weird mistranslation of Homer, one that had significant implications as to its meaning, and thus could mislead a student not aware of the original Greek or its cultural context. Which indeed can only be understood in context, because it is the cultural context of Homer that affects how we should read his words—or really, their words, as “Homer” was redacted over hundreds of years, with parts written in the, Bronze Age, and others in the Iron Age, as you watch its heroes miraculously change weapons and armor back and forth. But the cultural context remained relatively stable over that time, experiencing a slow transition from the Mycenaean to Archaic era.

My thesis was that as Greece prioritized physical achievement in its heroes (a notion carried throughout the epics of Homer, and only slowly eroded after the Archaic period, allowing some room later for intellectual heroes), and thus saw the dead as particularly crippled, having lost the very thing that makes people powerful. Conversely, China deprioritized (indeed even denigrated) such focus on the physical and elevated cultural heroism, its heroes being paragons of moral character and wisdom rather than physical achievement, and thus saw its dead as still powerful (a hero or villain’s force of character transforming into postmortem potency—whether malevolent or benevolent), because though deprived of their bodies, their continued existence entailed a retention of their minds and characters. Which translated into the centrality of ancestor worship. Ancient Rome sat somewhere in between—unlike Greece, it had ancestor worship, but unlike China, not centrally; and unlike Greece, it prioritized culture and wisdom in its heroes, but unlike China it still elevated physical achievement as well. Accordingly, Roman ghosts occupied a more ambiguous place in the scale between completely helpless and terrifyingly capable. These correlations do exist, but have exceptions, and may have other causal foundations. What’s relevant to the point today is that these things affect how we translate Homer (or Virgil or Ch’iu-ming).

I won’t go into Homer’s ideology of heroism today, just his ideology of ghosts. The simplest evidence lies in how souls are shown to act, and what they are capable of. In Homer, souls don’t seem capable of much at all. Although he describes the souls of the dead as appearing identical to the person when they were alive, thus retaining something of their individuality (Il. 23.107, Od. 11.36-43), they are unable to be touched or grasped (Il. 23.100-3; Od. 11.204-8) and lack the strength to grasp others (Od. 11.393-4). The groaning horde of phantoms creeping up to Odysseus to drink the sacrificial blood is the most moving example of the impotency of the Homeric soul (Od. 11.30-130). Most of the ghosts gain their wits only upon drinking the offered blood (thus requiring the aid of necromantic magic). Even then, the dead display no knowledge of the world above, much less the power to affect it, as they cannot even contest Odysseus’ sword or work any other evils or blessings upon him.

Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood suggested that a statement by Achilles (Il. 24.595-6) suggests otherwise, but Achilles there says “if only” the dead Hector might know what he was doing, thus it cannot be said Achilles believed Hector would know. Which reflects the hazards of translating correctly, but mistaking the meaning of what has been said. Likewise, Sourvinou-Inwood suggests that the ability to keep the souls at bay with a sword “implies some sort of corporeal nature,” but that is not so clear: apart from the possible talismanic powers of bronze, if the dead do not have all their wits, then the fact that a sword can’t harm them might never occur to them—they may be acting upon the same instincts they possessed when alive. Likewise that they “drink blood” need not entail physical lips and a digestive system, in a world of magic where the mere absorbing of blood’s power (its essential life force) may have been imagined instead. And the evidence is otherwise clear: the dead are utterly bodiless and thus powerless and dumb.

Hence Odysseus does not fear the numberless dead approaching “with a confused and wondrous noise” (Od. 11.632-5) but only “the Gorgon head of a dreadful monster” that the goddess Persephone might send against him. He fears demons, not the souls or ghosts of the dead. Likewise, Elpenor does not threaten to “haunt” Odysseus, as Walter Shewring translates Od. 11.70, but merely warns that he might “become the cause of some wrath of the gods” against him. Which means, in a manner elaborated by Virgil for Elpenor’s parallel, Palinurus (Ae. 6.376-83), where it is not Elpenor or Palinurus who were to be feared, but gods offended by Osysseus’s or Aeneas’s cultural neglect—and the monsters they might send. Thus, in their actions alone, the souls of the dead are powerless in Homer. Indeed, they are the exact opposite of the living hero, just as we should expect if everything that makes a hero is tied to having a body.

This is where we get to the misleading mistranslation I just mentioned: when the magically re-awakened ghost of Elpenor speaks to Odysseus—surprising him with the news that he is even dead (a member of his crew, Elpenor had fallen off a roof and died, and no one noticed) but frightening him with the realization that this means he left a corpse uncared for—Shewring renders the key line as “do not turn your back and leave me unburied and unlamented at your going—I should haunt you with the wrath of heaven.” A modern reader might take this to mean Elepnor threatened to haunt Odysseus, and indeed do so with celestial power, implying Elpenor’s ghost was quite scary, as much as any you might encounter in Chinese myth, who could literally kill you on the battlefield or summon beasts to rend you limb from limb. But that is misleading. It’s not what Homer wrote. It is a fancier redux of what the earlier translator A.T. Murray thought (“Leave me not behind thee unwept and unburied as thou goest thence, and turn not away from me, lest haply I bring the wrath of the gods upon thee”), but that’s the same error, just in a style of English well now out of vogue.

What Homer wrote was:

μή μ᾽ ἄκλαυτον ἄθαπτον ἰὼν ὄπιθεν καταλείπειν νοσφισθείς, μή τοί τι θεῶν μήνιμα γένωμαι

Which translates more literally as: “go not to leave me behind, unlamented, unburied, to turn your back, lest I become some cause of wrath from the gods against you.” There’s a lot of poetic genius in the verse, as usually in Homer. An alliterative introduction (μή με, “do not me”); the double attributive (ἄκλαυτον ἄθαπτον, “unlamented [and] unburied”) in chiastic position to the double infinitive (καταλείπειν νοσφισθείς, “leave [and] turn your back”), separated by the central point (ἰὼν ὄπιθεν, “going” and “behind”) where the participle refers back to the injunction (to “not” do that) and the adverb referring forward to the infinitive, “leave” (me behind), and the doubling of sense between leaving him “behind” and Odysseus turning “his back.” Likewise in the apodosis of the conditional, “lest not,” duplicating the negative μή and following it with a second alliteration, τοί τι θεῶν, “against you, something” from the gods (theôn, sounding like t’heôn); and the pun (which only someone who reads Greek might catch) with the use of μήνιμα (“cause of wrath,” “blood-guilt”) which looks and sounds like μνῆμα (“monument to the dead,” “epitaph,” “burial”), from mnêmê (“remember,” as of the dead), in a line about not forgetting him and ensuring his burial. Thus Homer’s choice of specifically the word mênima was poetically derived. All of which is lost in translation—hence a lot of meaning in a text can only be found in its original language.

But the most crucial word here is γένωμαι, i.e. gignomai (or ginomai in later Koine), “become.” This is a verb here placed in the first person singular (hence Elpenor is speaking of himself), and in the aorist tense/aspect (meaning a singular one-off event, not an ongoing one, and in the past relative to the action threatened, in this case the potential future “wrath of the gods,” literally stated: θεῶν μήνιμα), and subjunctive mood (meaning the statement refers to a possible or hypothetical rather than an actual future), and middle voice (meaning Elpenor is both cause and recipient of the effect: being neglected and therefore a cause of gods’ wrath). Shewring’s translation is correct in the protasis of the conditional, “do not turn your back and leave me unburied and unlamented at your going” is a bit loose, but given Homer’s poetic omitting of normally expected grammatical elements like conjunctions and his poetic play with word order (which does not work at all in English), it’s about as well as you can do. My own “more literal” translation is also not a one-to-one match. For example, “at your going” is a better rendering of the sense of the participle than my just rendering it as the verb, “go”; and yet “at” and “your” are not in the Greek, they are however implied by the Greek, which uses participles to convey almost entire sentences of meaning. A straight literal translation would be “going” but in English that lacks all the nuances of the Greek. It can be “when you go,” “because you go,” “since you go,” and so on; all are senses of the word that are lost if you just one-to-one replace it with “going.”

Indeed, a literal translation would be something like this (each word in Greek represented by a bracket): [Not] [me] [unlamented] [unburied] [going] [behind] [to leave] [to turn your back] [that not] [to you][some][cause of wrath][I become]. Which is virtually unintelligible in English. So we have to take some license even just to render the sense into English grammar rather than ancient Greek. And I do mean ancient Greek. Modern Greek grammar is actually closer to English and thus easier to render; and even Koine (the Greek of the Bible and most literature of its period), though not as close to English as modern Greek, is still closer than Homeric Greek, which is very archaic. Indeed, to Koine ears, it would have been somewhat like Shakespearean English today. The Greek grammar contains elements the English lacks—like the inflection of verbs, nouns, participles, and adjectives that carries information no corresponding feature does in English, like person or aspect or mood. We usually have to bring those back in by adding words. Hence Shewring’s “at your going.”

But this also means getting the sense wrong in the transfer is easier to do. Shewring’s license does a great job of rendering the protasis into intelligible English. But it trips him up in rendering the apodosis, which he gives as “I should haunt you with the wrath of heaven.” Because Shewring decided to translate “gods” as “heaven,” a word with a very different valence, particularly to modern ears (it seems to remove the actual agents Elpenor is referring to: actual superpowers, divine entities, and in the plural); and he chose “I should” to render the subjunctive, a word with a different implication than the more passive “lest I become,” which is what the Greek more actually says; and he chose “haunt” in place of “cause of wrath,” even though “haunt” is nowhere in the Greek, and in modern English has a much more active sense. But to the contrary, Homer went out of his way to render the passivity of Elpenor, his lack of direct involvement, and thus lack of power, in the whole matter; almost his every word choice takes away Elpenor’s agency. He does not say “I shall haunt you,” he says “I might become a cause of the gods going after you,” in other words the gods and their monsters is the threat; Elpenor has nothing to do with it, other than being the victim of neglect that would anger and set them off.

Here you can see two things: (1) the assumptions a translator makes when translating can distort the meaning of what the author actually said, creating confusions between ancient words and their valences, and modern words and their different valences; and (2) knowing the background and culture, and the reconstructed ideology of an author, can help realign your assumptions into correct ones when translating. And this is the point of a lot of scholarship you might think is weirdly obscure. My entire thesis was designed to help get at one aspect of the assumptions and ideology of Homer himself, which helped me see the actual contextual meaning of Homer’s choices of words and structure when describing Elpenor’s threat to Odysseus. Informed, I could see its direct implications of passivity and powerlessness (the gods, not Elpenor himself, are dangerous). Uninformed, Shewring anachronistically imagined a Shakespearan ghost threatening horrors of his own upon Odysseus.

This is why attention to translation matters, why being able to check a translation against the underlying language matters, and why translation competency requires more than just a mastery of both languages’ grammar, but also the ideological and cultural and literary and verbal context of the original author, since the sense of what they mean derives from all of those things, which the author takes for granted his fellow readers readily know, but which of course we thousands of years later do not—unless we take a lot of pains to acclimate ourselves to that intellectual and linguistic climate so we, too, can see the text as the author intended, and not as our modern preferences assume. (For an example of all this happening, in Greek, in relation to biblical history, see A Primer on Successful vs. Bogus Methodology: Tim O’Neill Edition.)

Did Frontinus Say the Romans Had Given Up on Artillery R&D?

Now for a very different example that communicates the same point from a different angle, this time in Latin, of the Silver era (the Romano-Hellenistic era of the New Testament itself), and from a different context: technical prose, instead of poetry. This one comes from my Columbia University doctoral dissertation (which I expanded into the book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, here drawing from pp. 282–83). One of the issues I had to dispatch a lot in that study was early 20th century Anglo-American Christian-imperialist bigotry, a zeitgeist that infected translators and historians with a haughty mindset that read everything the ancients said in the most negative light, whenever doing so would elevate in appearance the achievements of Christian European imperialists. This manifested in a lot of ways, many of which I document, but the one pertinent here was a trend toward assuming the Roman Empire made no progress in science and technology, and thus we needed the Christian Bible to motivate the world to do that (even if that wasn’t always explicitly stated); in other words, that the Roman Empire was an era of scientific and technological stagnation or even decline. This is all bollocks and I refute it in extensive detail (but for a taste, see Imperial Roman Economics as an Example of an Overthrown Consensus and Ancient Industrial Machinery & Modern Christian Mythology; on actual Roman advances in artillery specifically, which were impressive, see Tracey Rihll’s outstanding monograph The Catapult: A History).

But one example hits right on our theme of translation errors even coming from experts, which lay readers won’t know because (often) there is no other translation to consult (or even when there is, it repeats the same errors, as translators are influenced by each other’s decisions, or share the same assumptions—often both). This is a passage in the Stratagems of Frontinus, in particular a preface to his third volume (we would now say chapter) of that work, in which Frontinus is describing the contents of that volume as to do with siege warfare. In this context Frontinus explains why he won’t include discussion of siege technologies. Charles Bennett translates the line in question like this:

Laying aside also all considerations of works and engines of war, the invention of which has long since reached its limit,​ and for the improvement of which I see no further hope in the applied arts, I shall recognize the following types of stratagems connected with siege operations…

Bennett even mocks Frontinus in a footnote here, noting how this remark is “a curious illustration of the rashness of prophecy.” In other words, “What an idiot! Frontinus (therefore the Roman Empire) thought there could be no more advances in siege technology!” And indeed, this conclusion would go on to be cited and used by real historians arguing that, indeed, the Roman Empire saw the decline of any further advances or research in any of the sciences, even military technologies; and entire theories of social science would be spun out of this premise by way of explaining it (I go into all that in Scientist). All rubbish, built on a foundation of rubbish, including this completely botched translation of Frontinus—who did not at all write what Bennett presents us.

The author, Frontinus, is in this case allegedly embracing the futility of any further research in the matter of siege tech (and even artillery), rather than complaining for more. But this cannot have been his meaning, because the Strategems is not a book about artillery construction or design, or technology at all, but a mere collection of past examples (not current) of battlefield strategies excerpted from history books (not technical manuals), organized by topic (as he explains in his preface to volume one). When Frontinus gets to his chapter on past stratagems employed in siege warfare, he actually says (here giving my more literal and accurate translation from the Latin):

Having set aside siegeworks and siege engines, because their discovery was completed long ago (so I attend no further to any material from those arts), I will put together the following kinds of stratagems regarding sieges: [listing eleven categories]…. then in contrast, regarding the protection of the besieged: [listing seven more categories].

If you are facile, you can check this against the actual Latin of Frontinus:

Depositis autem operibus et machinamentis, quorum expleta iam pridem inventione (nullam video ultra artium materiam), has circa expugnationem species stratêgêmatôn fecimus: … Ex contrario circa tutelam obsessorum …

There is no way to get Bennett’s meaning from this, which contains neither the word “improvement” nor “hope,” or from the context, which isn’t about technologies, but strategies. The Strategems is not a treatise on machines, but tactics (decisions made by commanders in the field that affect the outcome of battles and campaigns, as Frontinus explains in his preface to book one), and it was intended as a supplement to his more systematic treatise on Military Science, which we do not have (so we really do not know his thoughts on war technology). More importantly, since Frontinus is explicitly not innovating anywhere in the Strategems, but only collecting past examples of actual stratagems (many dating back centuries), he cannot be referring here to innovations in siege weapons. He can only mean their subject has already been thoroughly covered elsewhere and therefore he is no longer going to attend to it.

We would otherwise expect Frontinus to include among his categories of stratagems a section that lists historical examples of tactics involving siege machinery. There was certainly plenty of such material available to Frontinus, so his apologizing for not including it cannot have been because there was none, or that he knew of none, or that a field commander would have no use for it. The only reason he could have for leaving it out is that the subject was already adequately covered by other authors. Therefore, from this passage we cannot infer that Frontinus believed there would be no future developments in military science. That’s clear from the context—which Bennett ignored, translating the line solely according to his Christian imperialist biases, and not according to the context of what Frontinus is even writing (the book as a whole, this chapter in particular, and the contents and aims of both).

But it’s also clear from the Latin, which Bennett has taken extreme license with (unbracketed words in bold are not in the Latin; while brackets represent corresponding words in the Latin):

• Depositis autem operibus et machinamentis, quorum expleta iam pridem inventione (nullam video ultra artium materiam)
• [Having set aside] [however] [siegeworks] [and] [siege engines] [whose] [discovery] [was completed] [long] [ago] [I attend] [no] [further] [to any material] [from those arts]
• [Laying aside] [also] all considerations of [works] [and] [engines of war] [the invention] [of which] [has [long] [since] reached its limit]​ and for the improvement of which [I see] [no] [further] hope in the applied [arts]

Bennett has added “all considerations of” which is not in the Latin though it is the implied sense (it’s just more verbose than Frontinus); but then he also added “for the improvement of which” and “hope” and “applied,” none of which is even implied in the Latin; Bennett has simply inserted these as assumptions.

And to get this result he renders video as simply “I see,” which is the literal sense, but words often (indeed usually) aren’t employed so hyper-literally. “I see what you are saying” does not mean I am visually looking at images of your words coming out of your mouth. When Frontinus says “I see no further material from those arts” he does not mean he sees nothing new to report (nothing in his book is about reporting what’s new; his entire book is about reporting what’s old—it is a collection of past, often ancient, ideas); rather, he is simply describing the fact that he will not discuss that subject any further. The Latin video means not just “see” but, among other things, “look at,” “visit,” “look to,” “consider,” “to think or reflect upon,” “provide.” Given that he is discussing the contents of the ensuing chapter, what meaning do you think he is employing here? Do you think, maybe, one that relates to what he is talking about? Hence, he clearly does not mean “I see no further,” but “I provide nothing further,” “I consider no further,” i.e. I will not say anything more on that subject. He isn’t saying he knows of nothing new to report. This is an example of the valence of an ancient word (video) not matching that of its nearest modern equivalent (to see), producing a misleading translation when translated literally.

Likewise, Bennett has rendered inventione hyper-literally as “invention.” But in the context of rhetoric (like describing the contents—i.e. the argument—of a chapter) inventio means simply the discovery phase, or presentation phase, of an argument. In other words, Frontinus is not talking about inventing technologies, he is talking about himself not looking for any more material to present. And when he says expleta iam pridem, “completed long ago,” the Latin means “satisfy,” “filled up,” “sated,” “discharged,” while iampridem means “for a long time now,” meaning not “a long time ago” in the literal sense (as if it ended long ago) but in the extended sense, “up to now.” In other words, he is simply saying tons of books have been written already, thoroughly covering war technology, and that’s been the case for a long time now, so he has no need of revisiting the subject here, because one can just go consult those other works. In his book’s introduction he presented himself as doing something new and thus badly needed (“I alone of those interested in military science have undertaken to reduce its rules to system,” Strat. 1.pr) and goes on to explain he is the first to put in the long effort to assemble a collection of brief anecdotes to the purpose from many disparate historical tomes. So here, in his book’s third volume, he is simply saying he won’t bother doing this for tech, because that’s already been done. There is nothing here about technological innovation coming to an end.

That’s how we can know video must mean ‘attend to’ or ‘present’ (and not ‘see’ or ‘know’); ultra must refer only to the rest of his present chapter; and nullam…materiam must mean passages he could have collected on the subject to include in this chapter, not future technologies. Hence expleta iam pridem inventione does not refer to the discovery (i.e. invention) of machines, but the rhetorical process of inventio, i.e. collecting and filling out topoi (i.e. “topics” and “examples”) as Frontinus does throughout the Stratagems. This is all obvious when you read the line in context. When you attend to what this book is, what he says he is setting out to accomplish in it, and what he is telling you in this preface (which is, the things he will include and not include and why), nothing of Bennett’s presuppositions come to mind. Those all arise from Bennett’s own mind and context, a mind and context alien to Frontinus and thus not something he could be writing for. In Frontinus’s own context, he is talking about inventio as a rhetorical exercise, the one served by the entire book, and materiam as passages he could have hunted down and included, and expleta as the accomplishment of this task already by many other authors before him.

Once again, this is why attention to translation matters, why being able to check a translation against the underlying language matters, and why translation competency requires more than just a mastery of both languages’ grammar, but also the ideological and cultural and literary and verbal context of the original author, since the sense of what they mean derives from all of those things, which the author takes for granted his fellow readers readily know, but which of course we thousands of years later do not—unless we take a lot of pains to acclimate ourselves to that intellectual and linguistic climate so we, too, can see the text as the author intended, and not as our modern preferences assume. (For an example of all this happening, in Latin, in relation to biblical history, see How Not to Act Like a Crank: On Evaluating Pliny’s Alleged Mention of Nazareth.)

Conclusion

In both cases, experts have mistranslated an ancient text, in ways that would entirely mislead and bamboozle a reader who doesn’t know how to check if that translation is contextually accurate, which takes more than just knowing the language, but also knowing the entire context of its use. As in the case of Homer, knowing that Homer evinces continually that he does not believe ghosts have any power to harm anyone, and therefore when he says the gods are the ones who would bring Odysseus harm, he means that. He does not mean Elpenor will haunt Odysseus, much less personally do him ill. And in the case of Frontinus, knowing what inventio actually meant then in the context of assembling examples, and that that is the entire context of what Frontinus’s book is, and knowing that iampridem can indicate a span up to the present, not just a long ago point in the past, and knowing that video rarely means literally seeing a thing but often means what Frontinus is actually talking about in that chapter-preface—what he will be presenting—all changes our understanding of what Frontinus actually said, and exposes Bennett’s additions to the text (“improvement,” “hope”) as biased and spurious.

Both cases illustrate the peril of mistranslation in a very large sense, because both implicate entire pervasive conclusions about culture and ideology and even historical reality. Bennett’s mistranslation of Frontinus contributed to producing an entire industry of false historical conclusions, entire studies and books, which all had to be torn down so the field could start over on a different foundation than Bennett’s mistake (and other mistakes like his). And Shewring’s mistranslation could have misled students and scholars into building entire edifices of theory about Homeric (if not the entirety of Archaic Greek) philosophy of ghosts and hauntings (and thus of the afterlife and the supernatural, and even religion) that would similarly have been entirely false. I aver this happens actually less in Biblical studies, owing to the pressure to not add words to the text, like Bennett did, and to not change the meaning of words so radically, like Shewring did. But this does not mean the problem is not still rife in Biblical studies, where the adding of non-existent words or the changing of words a bit far from their proper valence does still happen (see the examples from the NIV above), and can only be caught by knowing how to check, and by knowing the ancient context well enough to know what you are actually looking at even when you can get at the original language.

This is why historical expertise matters. But that does not mean lay people are out of luck. When historians do their jobs correctly, they will provide information (like I did here) that you can check, and thus you can vet who has the better end of a dispute among experts. For an example of how that works even for a very specialized and difficult case in biblical Greek grammar, see, again, Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony. And for gaining the grounding skills here, you can take my video course on New Testamant studies, whose skills are adaptable to any ancient field.