Bible Translations

[Maria]

I read some of the Sceptics Annotated Bible once, but it doesn't seem to say what version they are using. The language seems antiquated, so perhaps its an old one.

[themary]

Okay we ended up getting the Zondervan NIV Study Bible.

Where in the world do we start?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

"In the beginning ... "

[Whistler]

TM:

New Testament first, I think. The gospels, then Acts and the various letters...with the exception of Revelations, which will only bewilder you as it bewilders everybody else.

Then Genesis forward, skipping (for now) the long and heavy details of Mosaic law after Exodus. Pick up at Joshua and keep going all the way through the prophets, dipping into the Psalms as needed for relief from the heavy stuff therein.

Halley's Bible Handbook is a nice accompaniment. I certainly don't share all his interpretations and opinions, but he'll keep you aware of the time, place and circumstances relevant to each book.

[themary]

Thank you Whistler! I'll have to check out the handbook as well. I was just telling halplm that as much as I love history I'm no good at it, but enjoy putting events into context .

[MithLuin]

I agree that the gospels are a good place to start. They are managable, and well, the life of Jesus is really an important part .

I would not recommend tackling the entire Old Testament. Either pick a book (like Genesis or Exodus) and go really into it, or follow an overview guide that jumps around but gives you a sense of the history. There is just too much there to really 'get' it by plodding along without guidance. That, and my 11-year-old self got bored and quit somewhere late in Leviticus...the law is tough, but the lists of names in Deuteronomy are tougher. A hobbit with a love of geneology I am not!

Another approach would be to look at covenant (for instance) in the OT. So, you'd look at Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses, the Judges, Saul, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Hosea, Jeremiah, etc. But you'd have a common thread you'd be following through each passage (and that can help to tie it together even with a jumbled historical perspective).

There are lots of resources out there for bible studies, so figure out what your goal is, and then pick one that's appropriate.

Or just pick up the book and start reading .

[anthriel]

I tried to do that when I was 11, Mith. Unfortunately, I had the King James version, and it was one of those experiences where you laboriously read an entire page and then realize you don't have a single clue what it said.



This is so timely for me! My bible study has been meeting for several years before I joined them (although that was two years ago!) and apparently they had done a "Bible in a Year" study where they read the whole thing in a year!

By all accounts, it was a challenge... we're considering doing it again, though, and I am so psyched! There are parts of the Bible that I am sure I have NEVER read. I am looking forward to it!

[WampusCat]

I read the entire King James Version straight through cover to cover when I was 12. There was much I failed to understand, but I was too stubborn to give up.

Of course, I also read Don Quixote and Dr. Zhivago at about that time. Didn't understand much of them, either. It would have helped if I had known what men and women do to make babies. Geekily ignorant, that's what I was.

[themary]

I'm Catholic and they use the King James version and I knew straight away if I wanted to understand the Bible, King James was not the way to go. You all were ambitious, I tried reading the Bible when I was younger starting with Genesis. Emphasis on TRIED.

So Halplm and I began with the Gospel according to Matthew. There is an intro to each chapter which I'm finding quite useful and the footnotes are great.

[Padme]

I read Tolkien at 12....

re-read it later.

Glad I did.

[MithLuin]

Erm...Catholics don't use the King James version. That was an English Protestant phenomena . The New American (NASB) and the Douay-Rheims are the two Catholic versions I am familiar with. The New American is similar to the NIV, and the Douay-Rheims is...more like the Revised Standard? I'm not sure - it is an older version, which may have been based on the Latin Vulgate.

Matthew is a wonderful Gospel to start with, I think. Not as terse as Mark, nor as 'theological' as John. Lots of good stuff in there Enjoy!

I read LotR at 12 as well, Padme

[themary]

Erm...Catholics don't use the King James version. That was an English Protestant phenomena . The New American (NASB) and the Douay-Rheims are the two Catholic versions I am familiar with. The New American is similar to the NIV, and the Douay-Rheims is...more like the Revised Standard? I'm not sure - it is an older version, which may have been based on the Latin Vulgate.

Matthew is a wonderful Gospel to start with, I think. Not as terse as Mark, nor as 'theological' as John. Lots of good stuff in there Enjoy!

I read LotR at 12 as well, Padme

You see I really have no idea what Bible us Catholics use because we don't focus on Bible study. Well, my church didn't. There was a Bible study but not the way most churches have it.

I'm feeling really low lately and I'm over due with my Bible studies so I think I'll focus on that some time very soon.

Thanks Mith!

[WampusCat]

And I read LOTR at 10, Padme. Aren't we lucky to have found it so early in life?

[Lalaith]

Good luck, TM! You and hal are starting in the right place, I think. It's what I would've recommended.

When I am feeling low, I like to read in the Psalms and in NT books like Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philippians. Ecclesiastes is also a good one.

The NIV is quite nice for reading purposes. If you ever get into a heavier study (like a word study or something), I really like the New American Standard version. It preserves some of the words of the KJV and some of the lyricalness of it, while doing away with the antiquated words and phrases.

Lali

[Kushana]

Easiest to read, most accurate in translation, and easiest to study out of.

Hm, the first and last features will almost necesarilly conflict with the second.

For 1) check the "Introduction" or "Translator's Note" to be sure you are reading a fresh translation and not a dusting-off of the King James (or something that is a paraphrase and not, in fact, a translation at all.)

For 2) check that you are reading something based on Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament (I think we're up to the 27th edition: "Now With Newly-Discovered Papyri!") which is nearly identical to the United Bible Society's 4th edition for the New Testament, and with the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia for the Old Testament.

Erhrman's explanation of the faults of the Majority Text/Textus Receptus in his Misquoting Jesus should give anyone pause from continuing to use those texts as a basis for contemporary translations.

Also check who translated your Bible -- a particular scholar? A particular church or tradition? An ecumenical committee? Who did they envision as their audience? Who advised them? Where do they teach and what kind of other work have they done? It's always good to have another translation, a parallel Bible, or perhaps an interlinear Bible (Hebrew/English) or (Greek/English) or a site like the Blue Letter Bible for the moments when you feel ! or ? about how any one translation has rendered a verse -- all of them have clunkers, at some point.

For 3) pick the bible whose notes and helps you find most illuminating. From a historical point of view I'd recommend either the HarperCollins Study Bible or the Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha.

I've enjoyed the Jerusalem Bible, the Holman Christian Bible, the New English Bible, Moffet's translation, and the Revised Standard Version, in my day -- but there are a lot of good translations and those just happen to stick in my mind, at the moment.

A few others to consider, which attempt to get closer to the original languages:

Hugh Schoenfeld's translation The Original New Testament
Rober Graves' New Testament (Let's put it this way -- improvising metrically correct Classical Greek poetry was a parlor game in his household when he was growing up.)
The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy (The Schocken Bible, Volume 1) by Everett Fox
(A really wonderful book that gets very close to the effect of reading the Bible in Hebrew. )

Any Bible translation is good -- but I tend to be leery of the ones packaged for some-or-other niche market (especially when they make it difficult to weasel out just what translation they are) -- all of the 7,000-some New Testaments at Amazon.com mostly break down into variants on the following translations:

Contemporary English Version
King James Version
Living Bible
New American Standard Version
New International Version
New Living Translation
Revised Standard Version
Today's English Version

Many more exist (I collect them...) and they can be found in a good used bookstore.

Note: I cannot recommend Lamsa or Douglas-Klotz's translations, their translations from Syriac (Aramaic, but not the dialect Jesus spoke) are loose to the point of irresponsible.

Jean-Yves Leloup's extrabiblical translations are also fairly free, and I sometimes question whether he knows the languages he says he's working with.

Yours,
Kushana

[Primula Baggins]

I'm glad to read that the Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha meets with your approval, Kushana! It's the one my father (a retired pastor) and my own pastor both recommended. I've found it to be wonderful for study, with thorough notes, introductory essays, and a translation that's more pleasing to the ear than the oversimplified TEV my church insisted on making kids learn from while I was growing up.

[Kushana]

Dear Primula Baggins,

A fellow fan! It's a good book for classroom work ... but difficult to drag to class each day. (So is the Bible in Hebrew; everything else isn't quite so heavy.) One of my professors always brought a translation whose chief merits were its weight (it was small and light) and it had wide margins for making notes and jotting Greek (or Hebrew.) Now I don't blame him...

Yours,
Kushana

[Pearly Di]

I see that the Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha is the New Revised Standard Version.

I really like this translation. More literal than the NIV (which I also like for its contemporary but quite elegant English).

I bought TNIV (Today's New International Version) last summer. It's very attractively produced and laid out, with some useful stuff at the back and it's quite an easy Bible to carry around. I think that in some ways it's an improvement on the NIV - it takes into account the developments in biblical scholarship - although I can't help thinking it sometimes goes a wee bit overboard on gender-inclusive language. I can certainly see the point of gender-inclusive in most cases, but not necessarily all.

I've always thought The Living Bible was a pretty decent paraphrase.

I have far more mixed feelings about Eugene Petersen's The Message, which has gone down a storm amongst many evangelicals. Peterson has written a lot of books I like, it's ironic that The Message is my least favourite. I admit that sometimes The Message can be refreshing, but Peterson hasn't really written a paraphrase of the Bible, he's produced a commentary on the Bible. Which is fine, but that's not what The Message is marketed as. I'm not convinced that many Christians can tell the difference. Certainly as paraphrases go, The Message takes far, far more liberties than The Living Bible ever does.

[Primula Baggins]

Even more than the Living Bible? Wow.

A while back I saw a bumper sticker here in town: THE KING JAMES BIBLE IS THE UNALTERED WORD OF GOD.

I heard the RSV in church, mostly, while growing up (the TEV was for Sunday School), so some of the changes in the NRSV stand out to me. For example, a verse might refer to "children of God" and there would be a note on "children" that says "Gk: sons". In other words, inclusive language rather than strict adherence to the translation is the policy in instances like this.

But generally I find these changes trivial, and as I've said elsewhere, I do believe that inclusive language makes a real difference to women. For believers, the Bible is more than an interesting historical record; it's supposed to talk to us. I don't object to being included in the conversation, even if I know the original Greek word was different.

People who get angry about this and complain about "political correctness" are usually (I find) men, who have never had the experience of feeling excluded by the language of the Bible.

[Kushana]

Even more than the Living Bible? Wow.

Yipes! (A friend of mine says she found a steamroller in the Living Bible's Old Testament.)

A while back I saw a bumper sticker here in town: THE KING JAMES BIBLE IS THE UNALTERED WORD OF GOD.

Wycliffe and Tyndale would be so disappointed ... and what does that make of the 1611 KJV edition (scroll down in link), whose spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary have been variously moderized since?

http://www.greatsite.com/facsimile-reproductions/

... a verse might refer to "children of God" and there would be a note on "children" that says "Gk: sons".

It's difficult ... Greek has no word for "children" or "siblings" or "parents", masculine plural words are used when all of those are meant (and when are obviously (or potentially) meant.) I believe in being honest about the character and limitations of the original language, but it may be that we've finally woken up and noticed the sisters in Jesus' family, the women among his followers, the female hosts and benefactors and apostles Paul speaks of -- we all come out of traditions where men did things and were leaders, especially in religious matters, and few of us come from small, new upstart religions with crazy counter-cultural ideas about the radical liberty and equality of its members as siblings and co-worshipers.

(Quakers and Neo-Pagans excluded ... and if I missed your tradition, forgive me: I'm 1600 years out of my field.)

People who get angry about this and complain about "political correctness" are usually (I find) men, who have never had the experience of feeling excluded by the language of the Bible.

That's my experience, too.

Yours,
Kushana