An Examination of Parenthetical Phrases in the New Testament of the New Korean Revised Version: Cases of Translatory Comments, Asides, and Causal Explanations

This study is an attempt to investigate the statistics, origin, and syntactical functions of all 42 parenthetical phrases in the NT of NKRV(1998), so that the revisers of NKRV may make informed decisions on what to do about them in the next version of the Korean Bible. In our analyses, 42 phrases are categorized into five groups: translatory comments (10), asides (4), causal explanations (14), descriptions of concurrent situations (11) and presentations of detailed information (3). In terms of origin, it could be argued that about 80% of them came from the Greek text of the NTG¹² or a couple of English versions available to the revisers of the Korean Revised Bible (KRB) of 1938 (KJV and ERV). Consideration of the historical circumstances of the KRB is important because NKRV is a partial revision of KRV (1956), which is in turn a partial revision of the KRB. Most of parenthetical phrases in KRB have been transferred to the NKRV, which justifies taking KRB into account when studying the origin of the NKRV’s parenthetical phrases. The other three major Korean versions, KCB(1977), NKSV(2004), and NKT(2024) are factored in our study as well, along with NTGz²⁸ and three major English versions (NIV, ESV, and NRSUE). In this article, we evaluated 29 of the 42 phrases based on their syntactical functions: translatory notes (10 times), asides (4 times), and causal explanations (15 times). In order to decide whether or not we keep the parentheses, we should first read the text with the parentheses, and then without them. If, and only if, the parentheses help understand the text better, they are worth keeping. Otherwise, we should follow the original text, which does not have any parenthesis whatsoever. Upon our study, we found that the parentheses may well be removed in all of ten parenthetical phrases containing translatory notes. Out of the four phrases functioning as asides, two may retain parentheses, while the other two are better without them. Similar results are drawn from the fifteen causal explanations: most of them read better without parentheses while some may or may not retain them. Only one passage (Heb 10:8) reads better with the parentheses. If we want to keep the parentheses as they are, several passages require the parentheses to be moved to elsewhere in the sentence order. A more desirable solution to this issue is simply to follow the critical text, i.e. NTG²⁸ in terms of the kind and location of paratheses.