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If presented with some Plato and my trusty Liddell&Scott, I could come up with a grammatically cohesive and defensible translation that would still significantly differ semantically from any other translation of the same work -- which is to say that when you're talking about dead languages, the ability to describe a translation as accurate is more poetic than scientific.Yes... best available translation at the time. Other translations have surged which try to incorporate all of the available resources to solidify the meaning of the manuscripts from which the Biblical canon was derived.
None of us will ever understand the NT or the Phaedo as those works' contemporaries did, not only because our notion of the language is filtered through millenia of intentional and unintentional scholarly prevarication and semantic drift, but because we ourselves as readers/translators have a completely different vantage from which we interpret things. Worse yet, one of the best tools for homing in on a word's meaning (looking at how several contemporaries used a word or phrase and searching for semantic convergences between them) tends to break down in the case of figurative language like Plato and Jesus used. In such cases, Derrida's depressing statement that "every decoding is an encoding" seems to frankly be unavoidable. The most one can do by way of remedy is to read every translation of the NT to try to get a meta-interpretation that makes sense to her.
Anyway, I'm sure you'll simply interpret this as another effort to break your balls, but I think it's a philosophically interesting situation for people of faith.
