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
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
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