I have heard men use "woman" to refer to their wives, but I grant that this practice has fallen into disuse due to centuries of cultural baggage surrounding marriage.

That alone makes translating γυνή as "woman" all of the time virtually certain to lead people astray for the reasons I've already stated. 

You also said:

I agree that most translations are correct where they choose wife or woman and do not confuse the meaning when they do so, but you and I both take issue with at least one place where that is done. (You with Matt 5:28 and me with Matt 5:32.) Hence, why my proposed solution is to eliminate that type of interpretation entirely.

Okay, so it sounds to me like almost the entirety of the issue for you surrounds the translation of just two passages, as you agreed that most of the time, it's not an issue.  Instead of changing γυνή everywhere, wouldn't it make sense to just concentrate on the two passages where you think it's problematic then?

If you haven't read this article of mine, I suggest you do because it makes a more complete case.  To summarize, both the OT and NT words we translate adultery require a married woman to be involved according to the lexicons, biblical usage, and -- not in the article -- but all of the other scholarly writing I've seen on the words through years as well. 

Against all of that, what contravening evidence do you have that μοιχεύω could apply to a married man with an unmarried woman?

P.S.  I'm pretty sure I'll change it from "covet" to something else, which we can discuss after μοιχεύω.

And perhaps it's not as clear as it seems to be for me. I have heard men use "woman" to refer to their wives, but I grant that this practice has fallen into disuse due to centuries of cultural baggage surrounding marriage. Yet this only makes me feel like it is more important to be disciplined about translation choices. As you said about linguistic baggage; it is my contention that the word "wife" is actually linguistic baggage that we impose upon the scriptures. Scripture transcends culture and is counter-cultural. 

The language simply didn't have a word to distinguish a married woman from an unmarried one.

But it does: παρθένος. That fact undercuts your argument.

You also said:

Further, I don't agree that, in English, woman can't mean wife because my wife is a woman and while formal English does not tend to use "woman" to refer to wife, it is sufficiently prevalent in informal use.

I agree with the first highlighted clause, but completely disagree with the second.  As far as I can recall, I've literally never heard it used that way.  I asked my own wife if she had, since we grew up quite different backgrounds and areas.  She hasn't ever heard it used that way either as far as she can recall. 

Have you personally heard others use "woman" to mean "wife" with significant frequency? 

This is where I think you've made significant error by saying "adultery requires a married woman to be involved". In a sense, you are correct; but with that same logic, you would also be correct to say "adultery, necessarily, involves actual physical sexual contact" because that's the actual definition of adultery.

So just to clarify, do you agree that μοιχεύω ordinarily requires the involvement of a married woman?  (Ignoring contextual factors in this verse for the moment and only talking about the normal use of the word.)

Let me start by saying that I like the beginning of your article. You do well to bring out the nuance of the Greek language vs the prevailing translation traditions. It starts to stray at the "coveting" portion and misses wildly once you start to talk about the definition of adultery.

First, I think you may have gone too far to insert your understanding of "covet" and suggest that this verse only talks about "when you desire to take those things away from another person". Jesus had a word he could have used if he wanted to communicate "covet". The concept of coveting is covered by the Greek word pleonexia (verb) or pleonektes (noun) (Strong's 4123 and 4124). Given that Jesus did not use this word, it is not appropriate to go so far as to say "well he said this but meant that". No, he said "desire upon" epithumeo (Strong's 1937). Anything beyond than that is eisegesis.

Next, the matter of the definition of adultery. This is where I think you've made significant error by saying "adultery requires a married woman to be involved". In a sense, you are correct; but with that same logic, you would also be correct to say "adultery, necessarily, involves actual physical sexual contact" because that's the actual definition of adultery. If you then say that, you are forced to the conclusion that Jesus' words were nonsense. It is equally impossible to commit "definitional" adultery by desiring a man's wife as it is to commit adultery by desiring any woman. What you are effectively saying here is that "Jesus raised the bar on the definition of adultery, but not as much as most people think he did". If he raised the bar from actual sexual behavior, it seem quite arbitrary to force him to stop short of the simple "if you desire-upon a woman, you adulter her" that is communicated by a more straightforward translation of the verse.

But I would suggest that the entire conversation is moot because Jesus isn't just making a couple new rules: "anger is murder, you don't need to make an oath, and adultery is even looking at a man's wife" but he is setting a principle. What you do in your heart is just as important as what you physically do. You are just as culpable of sinning against God if you have even had evil desires. So, the principle is sufficiently clear when you translate verse 28 hyper-literally: "Moreover I am-saying to{you} that everyone, the viewing [a] woman toward the to-desire-upon same[feminine], already adulters same[feminine] in to{the heart} of{same[masculine]}." (Matt 5:28 GHT) If you objectify a woman, you adulter her. Doesn't matter who she is, doesn't matter who she is married to. God is outside of time, so even if she's not married "yet" she's still someone else's wife, unless she's your own and if she's going to be your wife, well you better start treating her better than as an object to fantasize over.

And this leads me to my primary objection to your article. You miss the entire point of the gospel by hyper-analyzing a "rule" in order to spare "good men of needless guilt". Do you not know that no man is good? (Mark 10:18) Do you not know that guilt is not from God? (John 3:17, Isaiah 1:18, etc.) Do you not know that there is no condemnation in Christ? (Romans 8:1) All have fallen short. (Romans 3:23). Why not teach men to understand who they are in Christ, that the Bible says they have been set free from sin (Romans 6:7) that they obtain this by faith (Eph 2:1-10) and that faith is confidence in the unseen (Hebrews 11:1).

I, personally, take the fact that "sin" in both Hebrew and Greek has a wider semantic range than in English and simply means "failure", "error", or "fault" to its extreme such that if I take a test and don't get a 100 (provided I have been given sufficient information to get that hundred) then I consider myself to have erred, I have sinned. Do I walk around with "needless guilt"? No, because I have been set free from that burden by being immersed into the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38). I walk by faith, not by sight. I may "see" myself sinning, I may see myself fall short of perfect, but I "forget what is behind and press on toward what is ahead" (Phil 3:13) with confidence, knowing my sins are forgiven and I am righteous according to the Word of God. (And no, I'm not some hyper-gracer who thinks that he can run around sinning and doing whatever he wants. God's law is perfect and I strive to meet it. I just know that I can't meet it on my own, so I rely on the Holy Spirit in me to achieve the victory.)

In spite of the previous passionate paragraphs, I do like the article. I would rewrite the intro a bit to avoid suggesting that its purpose is to spare people guilt. I would rewrite the "lust to coveting" section to stop half way at "desire upon" (which may just be a clearer understanding of what lust is), and I would drop the whole "she has to be married for it to be adultery" section. Then, I would re-write the conclusion as follows (keeping the first paragraph and the last two)

"You cross the line when you switch from noticing/admiring to desiring upon her.

"It’s about the desire to posses a woman who is not yours that Jesus warns about here. It’s perfectly normal and natural to find women attractive; just don’t cross the line and take hold of desire."

With that out of the way, my other issue is the arbitrary nature of translating moicheuo to "sex with another man's wife" in one place but "adultery" in others. (See Mark 8:37 BOS) Even in the same context you swap between the two. (Mark 10:11-12 BOS) Either do or do not use the word.

So proposed simpler translation would be:

“But I tell you, every man looking toward a woman in order to desire upon her, already adulters her in his heart." (Matt 5:28 BOS_mod)

In fact, if you think about it, the modern English cultural connotations of "marriage" do not lend to a good understanding of Scripture anyway. As I'm sure you know, the English speaking world does not treat marriage with any sort of reverence. People get married through the secular pagan court system, possibly with a religious ceremony covering over that, and then when they get tired of their spouses, they go back to the secular pagan court system and ask for the marriages to be undone. In fact, this is not unlike the pagan way of doing things during the time of the ancients, who also practiced serial polygamy by "having one spouse at a time", remarrying after forsaking the previous one(s). Yet it was not this way from the beginning. "What the God yokes together, man: be no separating." (Matt 19:6b and Mark 10:9 GHT)

So this is my point. Scripture informs scripture. It is clearly presented in scripture that sexual immorality exists and is inappropriate. Marriage as the representation of Christ and his bride is to be held in regard and undefiled. This theme is clearly and simply shown in the context of scripture, and does not need us, as translators, to add clarity, even if the option for further specificity exists in our language. Instead, we allow the reader to read scripture and learn what it means for himself. Scripture transcends culture and is counter-cultural, so what right have we to introduce our own cultural bias into it (our concept of marital status) based on the cultural bias present (assumption that a woman was married) at the time of writing.

So, we are still faced with the problem of interpretation bias. I agree that most translations are correct where they choose wife or woman and do not confuse the meaning when they do so, but you and I both take issue with at least one place where that is done. (You with Matt 5:28 and me with Matt 5:32.) Hence, why my proposed solution is to eliminate that type of interpretation entirely. Additional specificity introduces bias.

I appreciate that you went and tested my hypothesis, but I wonder if you found it more confusing simply because you aren't used to it and because your translation maintains many of the prevailing translation traditions that impose English language on the Greek source rather than allowing the simplicity of the Greek source to shine through, even if it results in poor English.

But for this thread, the underlying issue is that γυνή/gune means wife/woman, while the English word "woman" means only "woman" and doesn't mean "wife".  For example, if you say "He has a new woman", I would assume that the woman was not married to him for the simple reason that if she was married, in English, you would've said "He has a new wife". 

The additional specificity/precision is a function of the English language, not translation, because the English and Greek words simply mean different things.  The ancients simply had different words.  This is a limitation of English and I don't see a way around it.  

We can completely jettison any discussion of cultural context and that's still true. 

I did a find/replace in a Word file on some of the marriage passages to be more like you suggested to see if I was wrong about the above. The result gave me the impression that it was about cohabitation because again, the Greek and English words don't mean the same thing.  (It also made a lot less sense.)

That's part of the reason for the "Avoiding "Linguistic Baggage"." section of the translation principles page. 

The Greek word and English words simply don't mean the same thing, so we need to close off some meanings in translation; that's unavoidable.  Translating it "wife" closes off cohabitation, while "woman" implies that cohabitation is acceptable.  So if I have to close off a meaning in translation, I'd rather close off the immoral application.   

Even if you disagree, does that make sense?

And BTW, feel free to start a thread about Matt 5:28 and we can discuss it there.  🙂

To your point about 1 Cor 11, what right have you, the translator, to tell me, the reader, that 1 Cor 11 applies to all women? If you are correct that gune is better translated to "wife" then how can you be sure that 1 Cor 11 doesn't only apply to married women? I seem to recall that there have been, in history, debates about this very question.

Likewise how are you sure that Col 3:18-19 does not speak in a more general sense? Literally it would say; "the women, be submitting to the men as is proper in [the] Lord. The men, be loving the women and do not be embittered toward them." It is only through context that we would be able to see that this is talking to members of a household (fathers/children, slaves/masters).

You say you "translated it wife or woman depending on the context" but why must you assume that the readers and the local assemblies are not competent enough to see the same context you see?

So, the question you are faced as an uninspired translator of inspired words: do you affirm the verbal, grammatical, plenary inspiration of the Bible? Or do the words of God need some additional "specificity" or "precision"? If the ancients did not need a different word to distinguish between a married and unmarried woman, allowing the context to dictate, why do we think we are better than them? Once again, I appeal to your "Translate, Not Interpret Or Change" and "Translator Bias" sections in your translation theory page.

I was somewhat arbitrary in which word I chose to argue this point on. I don't have a specific axe to grind about woman/wife. I find that scripture tends to be clearer and simpler when we leave it as "woman". I feel the same about many other words that are translated into multiple English words from one Greek word. So yes, I would wish to see you do the same for man/husband, servant/deacon, immerse/baptize, assembly/church, change-of-mind/repent, evil-assertion/blasphemy, justice/righteousness, etc. (some of these are "context dependent" words from the same Greek word and others are just modern "Christianese"). I was emboldened to bring it up specifically because you had asserted what you had in the previously mentioned sections as well as the "Avoiding 'Chrstianese'" section. I figured I'd dip my toe in the water with a single word rather than shotgunning a bunch of threads at you.

I will acknowledge that, as I implied in my previous post, I take significant issue with your interpretation of Matthew 5:28, but this is a conversation best had elsewhere. I only seek to address that there are many places such as these where a translator inserts his interpretation into Scripture without considering that he is not infallible and should avoid interpretation as much as possible. If you seek for this to be a truly open-source translation you would need to acknowledge this bias you have and adjust your perspective to minimize interpretation.

So you said:

The semantic range of the Greek word perfectly overlaps that of the English, covering every adult female human. As you know, the word "wife" simply does not exist in Scripture and represents a subset of that semantic range.

I wholly disagree with that. 

One of the most interesting and fascinating things for me is the cultural assumptions embedded in language.  In both Hebrew and Greek, there were a few "classes" of women, such as: virgins (unmarried and assumed to have not had sex), widowed, divorced, prostitutes, and "wife/woman".  The cultural assumption was that every "adult female" would be married and thus a wife.  Thus, they didn't have a different word for "woman" than for "wife" because it was assumed that every "adult female" was also a wife, and every wife was also an "adult female".

(The same is true of man/husband.  And BTW, they didn't even have a conception of the word "adult"; that's a recent concept invented by John Locke, but I digress.)

English is more precise than Greek for some terms, and with our greater precision in (some) technical terms creates a dilemma for a translator.  While the Greeks see γυνή/gune and assume that such a woman is married unless stated not to be, we don't have that assumption. 

Thus, it would be more semantically accurate to always translate γυνή/gune as "wife" instead of "woman".  However, that creates problems when women are spoken of in a general sense, like in the first half of 1 Cor 11.  It just wouldn't make much sense.

However, because we don't have the cultural assumption of "woman = wife", translating passages like Col 1:18 as you suggest would read like this:  "Women, submit yourselves to your men"   In English, that doesn't make a lot of sense because we don't share the Greek (and Hebrew) cultural assumption of "woman = wife".  You could read this as a native English speaker and think it applies to cohabitation.  The same problem is created in many other passages as well. 

Thus, that's why I translated it wife or woman depending on the context. 

You're right that it applies to other words as well, including ἀνήρ/anér, which is "male/male/husband."  I assume you would prefer to strike "husband" as well? 

To Matthew 5, again, I would argue that the primary meaning of γυνή/gune is actually "wife", and the meaning of "woman" is a secondary meaning if you take language and cultural assumptions into account.  (And looking back at the article now, I see that I didn't make the above clear; I really should make an edit to fix that.)

The semantic range of the Greek word perfectly overlaps that of the English, covering every adult female human. As you know, the word "wife" simply does not exist in Scripture and represents a subset of that semantic range. 

I recognize that there are plenty of words such as ποιέω/poieo "do/make" which cannot be translated into a single English word. In these cases interpretation is unavoidable. But everywhere "wife" is used instead of "woman", the context speaks for itself.

(This argument applies to many other words such as διάκονος/diakonos "servant/deacon" with the preference for "servant" in all cases; see Rom 16:1 vs 1 Tim 3:8)

"It is not as if they were deprived of some important words, or that our language is superior to theirs.  For thousands of years they could have invented those words if they wanted to, but they didn't.  So, that is the way it is.  We ought not to add words to the scriptures, but rather, we ought to work with what the scriptures actually say. " - Garth Wiebe

The reason is because in most people's mind, if you can prove one component of the argument wrong, you've proven the whole argument wrong.  This appears to be a subconscious thing and of course isn't true, but it looks true to many people.  Thus, since it's easy to cast doubt on γάμους here, that casts doubt on the entire line of reasoning in Matthew 25.  Thus, it's best to ignore weaker and/or more debatable arguments whenever possible to avoid introducing these perceived/rhetorical weaknesses into your position.  

Additionally, weak arguments allow people to ignore your main/strongest arguments by focusing on your weaker arguments.  If the goal is truth and correct doctrine -- and it should be -- then you really would prefer discussing the stronger arguments for both sides.  And BTW, this cuts both ways; make sure you tackle opposing arguments head on and answer them soundly with scripture.  Don't just "pit one scripture against another"; look at the opposing side's arguments and demonstrate why they are wrong.  

Personally, I would only use "Jesus pictures Himself as a polygynous man in a parable" as a secondary argument.  I prefer to focus on the stronger argument of God directly commanding polygyny several times in the Old Testament. It's rather hard to argue that something is wrong when God issued a standing command to do that thing.  The Matthew 25 parable works better as a "cherry on top" sort of argument in my opinion.  (And I'm guessing you've read it, but I do have an article on polygyny if you haven't read it.)