Monday, April 25, 2011

More On King James and the 1611 Version of the Bible

Why do I like to talk about the Bible and Bible translations?  Because it digs into history and is a confortable respite from pressing business and the latest bad news at home and abroad.  Harmless academic inquiry, but still occasion for a good argument!  Here's the latest installment.

The craving for an unchanging translation, a single book that once and for all answers all questions, moral and scientific, is one reason many turn to religion in the first place.

In my opinion, the Bible is not such a book. It is filled more with questions and contradictions than answers. Study Euclidian geometry if you want a logical, self-contained system. Many disagree with me, and that is all right.

Was Elizabethan English the most perfect form of English? Well, it was the language of Shakespeare and Milton. But compared to the English of George Orwell or scores of other modern writers, how can one say it is more nearly perfect?

Actually much of the English of the "King James" or Authorized Version was not that of the translators. It is said that nearly 100% of the sentence structure of the New Testament and 60% of the Old was that of John Tyndale, who was executed around 1535. Basically, the translators plagiarized earlier translations. Wycliffe borrowed from Tyndale and the Geneva and Bishop's Bible from Wycliffe.

Ironic, wasn't it, that the English sovereign killed Tyndale for making and publishing an English translation of the scriptures, and then less than a hundred years later, a later sovereign declared that a new translation ought to be made and that one was based on the one by the man who was murdered by a predecessor king. But so it goes.

Actually it was Elizabeth who first urged that a big new Bible be made, and that turned out to be what came to be called "The Bishop's Bible."

James did, at a conference on improving the church, order that a Bible translation be made. But he didn't pay for it, and neither Parliament nor a convocation of bishops joined in authorizing a new Bible. James himself was a bit of a scholar, far more than most kings, and had done some Bible translating himself. But he had nothing else to do with the "King James" Bible.

I suspect James' reasons had to do with the fact that the Roman Catholic Church published a new English translation, the Douay-Rheims, in France just a few years before. National pride, or vanity, since James knew he would be mentioned on the title page?

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Obamablame

At a meeting this afternoon, it was remarked, "The federal estate tax exclusion has gone up to 5 million this year." Someone else said something like, "He must have missed that one." "He" meaning Obama. There were some nods and chuckles around the table, me excluded. Some kind of cut an eye my way, and I was stone faced, looking at the tabletop.

Bear in mind federal income taxes are at 20-year low levels, 45% of Americans don't pay any federal income tax, etc. Low marginal tax on the most wealthy.   

Still the expression lingers, "Tax and spend Democrats."   Democrats have done their share of spending, but taxing?
On Wednesday, a gent said, "Obama cut out the COLA from our social security." My understanding is the Cost of Living Adjustment is pegged to the CPI; when the Consumer Price Index is stable, there is no COLA. That Obama had nothing to do with it.

And so it goes. Obamablame.

Monday, April 18, 2011

The High Federal Income Tax Fantasy

Take a look at the AP release in today's newspaper. http://lubbockonline.com/money/2011-04-18/super-rich-see-federal-taxes-drop-dramatically

So much fussing about taxes, All the Tea Partying and such, you'd think the federal government was scalping taxpayers, flaying them alive, yet federal income taxes are at low levels unseen for decades. Obama is a freekin' low tax president! So far. From the article:

"WASHINGTON — As today’s tax filing deadline nears, ponder this: The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago, and nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all.

"The Internal Revenue Service tracks the tax returns with the 400 highest adjusted gross incomes each year. The average income on those returns in 2007, the latest year for IRS data, was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992.

Over the same period, the average federal income tax rate for all taxpayers declined to 9.3 percent from 9.9 percent.
"

The article went on to say that 45% of households pay no income tax at all. There's more and it's a short article. Read it.

So what's the big deal about taxes? Most of us are close to getting a free ride. Why the demonstrations? Why the dumping of tea into Boston harbor in 2008? Why was my stepson keeping us up late one night arguing that the Democrats were destroying the profit motive by taxing us to death? (Yes, he had a copy of Atlas Shrugged under his arm at the time.)

Is all the protest because the protestors are brainwashed by a handful of demagogues?

Well, yes. Demagoguery brought a TV hostess turned politician from Alaska wealth and fame.  No shortage of demagogues on FOX.   And the nutso conservative mob are willing to send money to any con-man who scares them with an anti-Democrat patter.

Though some of the concern is not for the tax situation as it is but as it might be, a sort of pre-emptive strike, as it were.

Also, there is a fallacy in the article. Do you see it? They are talking about federal income taxes. They are not including the other ways we are taxed, nearly 10% on many purchases through the sales tax, state income tax in many states, property taxes. When you add up ALL the taxes, federal, state and local, have taxes gone down?

But the Tea Party movement is primarily an anti-Washington, anti-federal government movement. Perhaps they ought to be taking aim closer to home.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Updates on Sitting Disease

Which is more deadly, a pack of cigarettes, a case of beer, or ... a sofa or chair? It may be the sofa or chair.

And couple the chair or sofa with TV, or work on the computer or telephone, for just a half dozen hours per day, and you have the long term equivalent of cyanide.

Employers should offer hazard pay for those who are sitting down a lot. It's more dangerous than working as a utility lineman, for example. What do you say? Double time for those who sit down at the job more than four hours a day? Tell your boss.

I was first alerted to "sitting disease" by an article in Bicycling Magazine by Selene Yeager like this one: http://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/sedentary-lifestyle-hazards

Enough of my rant. There's a NY Times mag article updating research in the area at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17sitting-t.html

Some choice quotes with my own emphasis and comments added in:

'The conventional wisdom... is that if you watch your diet and get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, you’ll effectively offset your sedentary time. A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. “Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting,” says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. ... [This is the scariest part. We always tell ourselves that we can reform, change our evil ways, and undo the damage. These scientists are saying that we can't even go to the gym every couple of days and undo the damage of sitting.  Maybe we can't even take a walk after work and undo the damage.]

'This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall. ... [In a word, instant metabolic syndrome. Ye ever helpful editor.]

'Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives. ... [And we wonder how it is that retirement kills...]

'“Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”'

Did you read all that? Odds are, you're gonna die an hour sooner because you sat there and read it. If the sitting don't kill you, the worry will. :mrgreen:

Wreck a chair, save a life.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

The Bible and Me; A Personal Memoir

Considering I am somehwere between an agnostic and out and out atheist, what is it about me and the Bible?  What is the interest, the fascination, about?  Several reasons.

First, since I was a tadpole, I've been interested in ancient history.  Back when I was 12 or 13, you's likely find me reading a translation of the Aenead or the Odyssey or Myers' Ancient History (a high school textbook commonly used back at the turn of the century, the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, that is)  or Ben Hur or Howard Fast's novel about Spartacus.   

My grandfather's books included Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and a set of  Plutarch's Lives of Illustrious Men, and his copy of Webster's First International Dictionary had fascinating paintings of historical ships and sea battles in it, that I poured over back in the trackless darkness before my memories began.  That was the drift of my upbringing; I should have majored in history and become some kind of scholar.

Plus all of us are fascinated by archaeology, right?  Who isn't?  A treasure hunt bearing the approved seal of science.

I am not a "minimalist," believing that Bible stories are independent from history and that Bible is useless as a guide to the past.    To me, the Bible is a resource that can be excavated like an archaeologial site.  There is much to be inferred from the Bible, unseen by those who claim to believe in it and study it.

Second, I like to read, and by exposure to the masters have slowly learned to treasure a good writing style.   Well, friends, the Bible in its 1611 version is a darn good example of good English writing style, and a style that has influenced  many generations of writers in English.

Third, and this gets right down and personal, biblical matters take me back to a simpler time of life.  There was a time when I was a believer, or something of a believer, and  we were all younger and unsophisticated and life was spread out before all of us with more promise than now.  For Christmas, 1960, I was given what I wanted most, a Bible.  Later, at school about 1965, I found a book about Hebrew history by a guy named Sanders, who taught that the wanderings of Abraham were really the wanderings and adventures of a tribe, preserved in Bible stories. 

Those old days make one feel warm and fuzzy, bringing back a time when one could believe that history, past, present and future, were encoded into the mysteries of the Bible.  That everything one needed to know was all bound up between the covers of a single book.   Haven't believed that for a long time.

One of my teachers, a Methodist, said to us one day that the future of the world is told in the Bible, one supposes the books of Daniel and Revelations and various prophets.  Now I consider that an extreme view, but with myself at that time reading on Ben Hur which touched on puzzling out the meanings of Daniel and mysterious prophecies of "a time, three times and a half-time" or whatever it was, a Biblical orientation to life and scholarship was altogether believable.

Anyway.  All this is by way of introducing some comments I made in relation to a newspaper story about all (or some) of the English Bible versions and paraphrases available today.    Here they are:

Fact is, each translation is doctrinally based. Necessarily. If you are a fundamentalist/evangelical, you choose the NIV or NKJV, if you are Catholic, you choose a Catholic translation, if middle of the road Protestant, you might pick the NRSV, if Jehovah's Witness, you will use a JW translation. If you are Jewish, you likely prefer a Jewish translation of what Christians call "the Old Testament".

Neat, isn't it, that versions are available that confirm our prejudices!

In general, there is a "Wycliff-Tyndale" thread of English translations that has persisted from the 1500s up to today. The KJV borrowed extensively from earlier translations by Tyndale and by Wycliffe, and the RSV and NRSV preserve much of the words and order of the KJV.

Those I like are the NEB, Jerusalem Bible (JB), and New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB).

What I don't like about the KJV is the way everything is organized by verse and not paragraphed to reflect poetry or subject. Most newer English translations present poetry as poetry.

A translation I'd like to commend is the Good News/Today's English Version, which despite the irritatingly simple English is a remarkably good translation, more accurately translating the 23rd Psalm than any other you can find except Jewish versions, and making clear that NT quotations are from the Septuagint.

The NRSV was the first mainstream translation to try to use gender-neutral language, and eventually even the NIV jumped onto that bandwagon. Because I am interested in scripture as close to original as possible, I join with Americanfirst in not liking this updating process.

About ten years ago, I was in an evangelical bookstore on South University and asked if they had a NRSV in stock; they didn't know what it was, though it had been out for years. They had NIVs, NKJVs, NASVs, and KJVs. It's the Presbyterians or Episcopalians or Lutherans or students who might want a NRSV.

If you want to stir up a hornet's nest, look at Isaiah (Isias) 7:14 in different versions. The story of the virgin birth in the New Testament arose from a mistranslation of Isaiah in the Alexandrine Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, which created a seeming "prophecy" that the exclusively Greek-reading Christians fulfilled by concocting a virgin birth story. Of course, others have a different spin on this.

So when you shop for a Bible, check out Isaiah 7:14 and other key scriptures. But make sure the notes give you the alternative readings.
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Um, didn't the Dead Sea Scrolls date from about the 1st century B.C.? They include the oldest copies of most OT scriptures. The next-oldest texts are only about a thousand years old, and agree pretty well with those among the Dead Sea Scrolls. But not perfectly; never perfectly.

There are many, many passages the meaning of which has to be guessed at. One reason being that Hebrew writing has consonants only: you have to guess at the vowels from the context. Other reasons being that the meaning is just not known for sure, or that available sources differ.

And the Septuagint --the translation of Hebrew scriptures into Greek made by Greek-speaking Jewish scholars in Egypt before about 150 B.C. -- is in places a bad translation. Which is important to Christians because that Greek translation was, to them, their "Bible," their Old Testament, and nearly all quotations of scripture in the New Testament were taken from the Septuagint.

Going back to Isaiah 7:14. It was the Septuagint that translated the Hebrew "a young woman shall give birth to a son" as "a virgin shall give birth..." So here is a prophecy that seems to have originated from a translation error.

But WAS it a translation error? Some argue that Jewish scholars in Alexandria, Egypt, had access to better Hebrew versions than we have today (remember Alexandria was THE center of learning in the ancient world), and that the Septuagint is a better translation. You see the problems.

Translation is everything. But the hardest part of the process is deciding what to translate from, because there are no original scriptures; there are only copies and versions, and the translator has to decide which are best. Which are questions of judgment and of doctrine.
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... or two out that compares Bible translations and paraphrases. Worth checking out.
Yes, the Jehovah's Witness' New World Bible did come out rather badly in comparisons.
Tell you what I like in a translation/version--

1. The name for "God" that was used in the original text. This is interesting because different names are used, and I have a theory about that which I won't get into. Yahweh, Adonai, Elohim, El Shaddai, Kyrios, etc. Most versions do not transcribe the name in the original language, but put in "Lord" instead. I like the Jerusalem Bible because it uses the name Yahweh when the Hebrew did.

2. Paragraphing that shows poetry as poetry, and uses paragraphing to help convey meaning. The KJV does not versify poetry and has a paragraph symbol. Forcing the Bible text into verses is artificial and hides context and meaning.

3. Plenty of notes about alternate versions or readings, and these must not be too doctrinal. There are plenty of study Bibles with a lot of notes, but some of these are very doctrinal and prejudiced. I have a KJV conservative study Bible (Falwell is named as an adviosor) that is handy for getting the low down on extreme thinking.

4. Type that is not too small or too large.

5. Arrangement of words into lines on the page that make reading comfortable. Two column text is not for fast reading. Neither are verse numbers in the text, IMO.

6. Paper that is not too thin or that allows the print on the reverse page to come through. I prefer creamy to beige off white paper and not that thin white "Bible paper."

7. A cover and binding like an ordinary book. Some may want the opposite -- a Bible that looks like a Bible.
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I don't like to use the term "King James Version" preferring to call it "the 1611 version" instead, because James didn't pay for it and had little to with it. None of the Bible translators who worked on that version got paid much for their labors. James didn't care. Nothing came out of his pocket, yet he got more credit than the ones who did the work. Ah, the privileges of kingship.

Wonder how many of those who love the KJV realize that King James was gay? Kind of fitting and ironic, isn't it, that the name of "Queen James" is affixed to a Bible version so beloved of homophobic fundamentalists? Who says there is no God?

Back a few years ago, there were many Christians in America who thought that the KJV was the original Bible, that "Authorized Version" meant "authorized by God." Some of the posts indicate we are not far from that here and now.

Something nobody mentioned yet: when you make the language of the Bible too simple, you downgrade the text. The Bible ought to sound sonorous and other worldly, and not like two teenagers rappin' in the school hallway. The KJV (or QJV) is definitely sonorous and other worldly.

When the language is too simple, I find it unappealing to read. Even the NRSV has gotten too colloquial. This is one reason why I like the New English Bible (NEB), because the language is literate and doesn't read like a 4th grade schoolbook.

The Jerusalem Bible is not too bad to read, and to those who love the English language, it has another appeal: J.R.R. Tolkien was involved in the translation/editing.

Originally posted at http://lubbockonline.com/faith/2011-04-12/bible-matters-what-difference-does-translation-make#comment-165012

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Oh, Hell

Seems there's a book out about hell, that is causing a fuss in Christian circles.  

The title of the book ought to be but isn't, "What the Hell."

From what I've seen of those who are quite certain they are going to heaven, I feel hell is the better option as far as the companionship of others.

And from what I've learned about God, both from reading the Bible and the news in the paper, I have to say that hanging with God and singing his/her/its praises the live long day is not so appealing either.

All the most interesting people would be in hell, and some of the worst would not be there.

Some of the best would be, too.

So mark me down for Hell.