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With reference to Luther's preference for "change one's mind" rather than "do penance) as a translation for metanoite, wmfights wrote I am struck by the mistakes in translation from Greek to Latin. Is it possible that Jerome was driven by pressure from within the institutional structure of the RCC, or were they just mistakes?

It was a mistake only if you take as true Luther's theology about repentance. This is a good example of claiming as fact what is in fact a dispute about interpretation. Sproul needs to read some medieval theologians before he pontificates about justification. Read Alister McGrath, Justitia Dei. McGrath is an Evangelical Protestant but he's honest enough a scholar (unlike the author of this article) to recognize that the Reformers introduced a totally new understanding of justification. McGrath thinks this is good because he thinks Augustine misunderstood the Hebrew terms translated in the Septuagint and that Luther and the humanists recovered the original forensic, or courtroom, meaning of the Greek terms. One can equally well look at the philology of the humanists as primitive--they failed to take into account that the secular Greek use of the terms involved would not govern their use in a religious text translating Hebrew theology, in the Septuagint. So Luther's reliance on the modernist scholarship of his day (humanism) actually led to a misunderstanding of what the Greek text meant when it was written and used by Paul.

In terms of methodology in biblical exegesis, what Luther did was to employ contemporary (modernist, from "modernus" meaning "now") methods that were primitive forays at lower criticism, and he ended up with false results because he didn't think through all the implications of the new scholarship.

It is true that the Greek terms translating the Hebrew language about "righteous" had only courtroom acquittal meanings in secular Greek literature in Paul's day. But that doesn't mean Paul had secular court acquittal meanings in mind when he used these terms. Words can take on new meanings. For centuries these Greek courtroom acquittal terms had been used in the Septuagint to translate Hebrew words that for the Jews clearly meant "become righteous" not merely "be declared righteous" or "acquitted." Paul was a Jew, steeped in the Jewish understanding of becoming righteous. When he read and used Greek courtroom acquittal terms in writing about righteousness, he thought in Hebrew terms. In other words, when one translates into a new language, the force of the meaning of what is translated can, over time, give new meaning to the words of the host language used to translate. One sometimes has to, in translating, use words that have only one, inadequate, set of connotations in the host language but their meaning becomes clear because the material, the content, being translated moves powerfully in the direction of a different meaning. That the Hebrews understood righteousness to be something we really are (or aren't) not merely a matter of courtroom acquittal, seems obvious to me. If one reads all the Hebrew scriptures on this subject in Greek dress (the Septuagint) again and again, as Paul would have done, the non-courtroom-acquittal meaning of "righteousness" would have come through.

Thus, if we wish to know what Paul meant by these terms (which Luther did, because he accused the Catholic church of misinterpreting them in the Church's theology of justification and salvation), going to secular Greek literature of the day by itself won't help. Yet that's what the humanist scholars on whom Luther depended did. And Luther could not see how limited, how narrow his exegetical method was. In short, the Reformation theology of justification rested on uncritical use of poor scholarship that had only recently come on-line. Luther was a modernist.