The word
“Everyone assumes that their Bible is accurate,” Blum said. That may not necessarily be the case. “The average person is not in a good position to make a judgment whether the NIV is more accurate than the King James. They rely on their pastors, or articles in magazines,” he said.
Even then, people pick a Bible most often based on reasons other than a good translation.
The 36 Christian denominations affiliated with the National Council of Churches, align themselves with the favored New Revised Standard Version.
Others continue to savor the Shakespearean language of the 1611 King James.
According to Phoenix-based Ellison Research, Bible translation preferences correlate not only to denominational ties, but to politics. In a nationwide study released in 2002, 34 percent of more than 500 Protestant pastors identified the NIV as the version they personally rely on for most of their work.
For those with an evangelical theology the number rose to 47 percent using the NIV. Pastors with a mainline theology favored the NRSV (51 percent). Pentecostal or charismatic pastors chose the KJV (45 percent).
Political conservatives also liked the KJV, but only as much as they liked the NIV (35 percent.) Moderates preferred the NIV (43 percent) and liberals, the NRSV (71 percent).
Basing their work on the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts, a group of 100 scholars has published the “first major full translation of the Bible to be released in more than 30 years.”
Involved too in their task was whether or not to make certain nouns and pronouns gender neutral – i.e. whether to remain faithful to the original or bow to the pressures of PC – something which all into-English translators grapple with on a daily basis. It’s usually dealt with by deferring to the cure-all “they” and, when that just doesn’t cut it, forced to choose either “he” or “she” and add a footnote in a mealy-mouthed voice of half-authority, half-apologia – assuring all readers that you are not sexist, it’s just that s/he is like a fishhook to the eyes and brain.
(Further fine talk on this subject can be found here and here.)
As fascinating and open to debate as this whole story is, I have to confess that my first thought was: aw, man, now even Bible scholars use acronyms. Is nothing sacred?
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Comment
- If you just refer to Gloria throughout, behold, the problem solveth itself!
http://www.thesisters.demon.co.uk/bible/genesis.htm
— language hat Apr 19, 11:30am # - Juxtapositions.
Got to
watch those
juxtapositions.
From the scatological to the eschatological, overnight practically.
There was an unspoken but clearly delivered certainty that the same God that inspired the prophets watched jealously over the existing Book with all His mighty might.
So that the idea, that untruth and non-revelatory paragraphs were not possible, was permanently fixed in our heads. Despite the drone of succession of Deuteronomy.
Contemplated because like a lot of adolescents bored in history class, it occurred to some of us how precisely fun it would be to duplicate the sermon’s text, slip it into the book and have the proctor read, at lesson at lunch, from in the midst of Isaiah,
“and there, unto these your sons, came that foul hypocrite Brady.”
Brady being the predatory Dean of Boys at the seminary whereat this occurred.
Possible given the automata mostly who read, dull and lifeless from a non-cerebral dunce’s trance.
If we could just slip it in there.
****
Isn’t there something going on with which of the genders first mutated from the other?
Or even if it’s an absorption of one by the other?
Or an integration?
Isn’t there something there?
My guess it was ladies first, then gentlemen. Which is why it got turned around, and upside down, by whoever wrote the Bible in the first place.
It’s a constant affirmation of the superiority of the male, that book.
Which you know, makes it a little, mm, indicative.
— msg Apr 19, 1:43pm # - I just picked up a copy of the Hebrew-English JPS Tanakh (Jewish Publication Society), which in the interest of linguistic accuracy dispenses with many traditional English formulations. For example, instead of the familiar ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…’—which is pretty standard for almost every English Bible I have looked at, including the new Holam CSB—, the translators of the JPS Tanakh give us ‘When God began to create heaven and earth…’
This is a wonderful example of how a different translation can make a familiar text seem fresh. So far, the JPS Tanakh seems to be wonderfully narrative, and a lot less self-consciously portentous than many English versions.
— John Hudson Apr 19, 11:12pm # - well shall i asketh thee if thyne would knoweth where one would go on line to read thy 1611 version on line thanks
— rick Apr 20, 12:02am # - “This is a wonderful example of how a different translation can make a familiar text seem fresh.”
BUT.
‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…’ and ‘When God began to create heaven and earth…’ are slightly different, aren’t they? (It’s hard to say without more text.) I am an atheist, so don’t confuse me with certain Bible-thumping types who insist that we somehow don’t change the Word of God [typo: Word of Gord—the Canadian Bible?] but that we are allowed to read it in translations of translations, but I am interested in myth and history, and when I read the Bible I don’t want fresh if fresh also means wrong, whether in sound or sense. I want the impossible and I want it now, damn it.
[sound of lightning, smell of burnt flesh]
—————
“well shall i asketh thee if thyne would knoweth where one would go on line to read thy 1611 version on line thanks”
Just google “king james version” for a number of links. Here’s the first one listed:
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/kjv.browse.html
— eeksypeeksy Apr 20, 3:22am # - In Canada, God-o says, “Let there be light, eh.”
In France He says, “Zer weel be laght, maybe, but not today, eet eez ma day hoff. Feel een zees forms, and maybe I do somessing next week.”
— gail Apr 20, 5:32am # - The first word, bereshith, lacks the definite article: preposition b- [in/with/by/among/though/as] with reshith, from rosh [cf. Rosh Hashanah, “New Year” or “Head of the year”]. “Bereshit bara’ Elohim et hashamayim vaeth haeretz.” Literally, “In first created [/shaped/formed; verb precedes noun] God [plural] the heaven [/sky] and the earth [/ground/land].
“Lo” has the effect of “Hey!” or, as my professor liked to say, “Yo!”
In the story of the covenant between YHWH and Abram, a key text for Christians, the pronouns are slippery: “And he believed in the Lord and he reckoned to him righteousness.”
And YHWH is more than, “I am what I am”; he says “I be what I be,” e.g. I’m free to act as I will.
A beautiful and elusive language. More: Adam comes from the adamah [dust or ground] and his blood is dam. The serpent is the nahash. Says the nahash to Eve, “You will not die death…”
Footnotes galore.
— Justin Apr 20, 8:15am # - Oops. Hashamayim is plural: heavens or skies.
— Justin Apr 20, 8:17am # - Justin-
I don’t have a conversant relationship with either Hebrew or Greek, but I’m thinking that that particular “I be what I be” with its attendant freedom, is more yours than Biblical. A fitting into english of something much more metaphysically profound.
Surely an eternal being doesn’t have movement.
Being within eternity, partial and finite the way we do it, means travel.
Being in eternity for an eternal being wouldn’t have that travelling aspect.
Because to travel you need absence; you need to not be somewhere, in order to go there.
Will, free, or whatever other form there is, means essentially a progression from one state to another.
More travel, more absence.
— msg Apr 20, 12:34pm # - Eternal is a philosophical concept that really means existence outside of time; however, the term is used conventionally to mean ‘everlasting’, which is not outside of time. Much confusion stems from the confused meanings of this term.
Regarding Justin’s translation ‘I be what I be’, this is perfectly Biblical, insofar as any translation can be said to be. The JPS Tanakh deliberately does not translate these words—Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh—noting in a footnote that the meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain, and that it is variously translated: ‘I Am That I Am’, ‘I Am Who I Am’, ‘I Will Be What I Will Be’, etc.
— John Hudson Apr 20, 1:54pm # - First, my Hebrew experience is limited to two semesters (so I’m no expert, just a fan). Second, the translation “I be what I be” belongs to an author I read years ago.
That the JPS Tanakh abstains from translating the divine name keeps with a certain tradition. I think the translation I report is more appropriate to the deity’s character than “I am what I am”.
The Hebrew Bible offers examples of God’s mobility and even absence. One is the flying four-wheeled chariot—from Ezekiel’s vision—in which the deity leaves the Jerusalem temple to be with the exiled Israel. Some theologians argue that we’re dealing with a free God instead of one bound to ideas of how a god should exist, where, and to what extent—but still one actively engaged with humanity. cf. Walter Brueggemann, Dorothee Soelle.
— Justin Apr 20, 3:03pm # - I’m one of those who picked a bible for reasons other than the quality of the translation. Today’s English Version bored me to tears so I’m giving King James a try, for the poetical aspect alone.
— cmb Apr 23, 4:13pm # - I would trust Justin and John with a translation of the Bible because they focus on the core of what that task entails—a deeply felt understanding of the ambiguities of language (and of Hebrew in particular) and a willingness to submit to the rules of the language itself in order to have impressed upon them the most approximate possible meaning. All the other considerations about poetry and impossibility and divine movement are distractions. We must determine what the text requires of us, not require things of the text. That approach to translation is in itself an act of religious submission, and that’s about as religious or metaphysical as it ever need get.
— QHLTH60 Apr 23, 8:20pm # - I keep rolling “most approximate possible meaning” around and think I may have meant the “closest possible approximation of its meaning” or some such thing.
— QHLTH60 Apr 23, 8:23pm # - As distracting as it may be to some, there are still many others of us who find the contemplation of the eternal consistently rewarding, and a good lens through which to view the partisan chauvinism of much that purports to be divinely revealed, whether sutra, veda, or biblical chapter and verse.
Speaking only as myself, from my own experience, I’ve found most people think of eternal existence as a kind of life-extension with a sort of rosy glow at the far end.
My point in response to Justin was about that confusion, precisely.
It’s important because it leads to an anthropomorphized God, a God stuck in time like we are; a failing on all counts, and a dangerous illusion, especially now, in this critical time, when a God who’s merely a reflection of our own desires seems to give permission for the most egregious acts.
The POV of an eternal being doesn’t map too well on ours, even given the assumption of our having a place in eternity from here on out. That’s still not the whole thing. We missed the first half of the movie.
While you, Q-etc…, may find it distracting, I’ll bet I could find at least two other people who think that distinction’s not only pertinent, but important enough it bears repeating.
As does my assertion that partisan chauvinism, even when thinly disguised as intellectual quibbling, should always be recognized for what it is.
—
As to whether CMB’s choosing a particular text for its “poetical aspect alone” is appropriate, I can’t think of a higher standard to hold revealed truth to than beauty.
— msg Apr 23, 9:48pm # - How eminently skilled I am at
Self-distraction. Like a hummingbird inches
Away from the flower’s open mouth,
Offering me nectar that I might sustain myself,
While instead I become enthralled by my own
Reflection in a dewdrop, hanging from
The fuschia. In that moment I enter a reverie
Of self-adoration, wherein I love myself as a Vision of the expansiveness of all possibility;
Wherein the perceptual reality of my own Preference seems imminent, so close that I can taste it.
Such that in this dewdrop illusion I believe that The contemplations most dear to my heart may be actualized;
Wherein the requirements of flight and exertion
Fall away and I perceive an eternal beauty in that moment
Of distraction in myself.
Oh that the world may revolve around me and be
Saved from their confusions by my realizations!
Except that, pausing so long between the reflection and the flower,
I wait too long for nectar and I fall,
Beautiful thing that I am,
And offer my plumage to the reality that places
Its requirements upon me, whether
I prefer it or not.
Meanwhile, the flower waits, offering its nectar—Blandly existing without metaphysics or agenda.
There is no other purpose that beckons it away
From the union of its form with function.
But as for myself—How eminently skilled I am at self-distraction.
— QHLTH60 Apr 24, 12:18pm # - These are the tones I remember from the Jesuit gays, acting toward one goal, professing another.
The knowing smirk.
That edge of extra-knowledge.
And a field of helpless boys to weed the rebels out of.
— msg Apr 24, 12:26pm # - Gail, I don’t know who this monosodium glutamate person is, but they’re weird. I wasn’t aware that this was a space in which strangers attacked each other. Somebody needs to chill, and I apologize for my end of the conversation, since it seems to have brought the floridly delusional out of the woodwork.
— QHLTH60 Apr 24, 6:10pm # - My apologies to Gail for getting her name mentioned by someone too conversationally inept to realize the tone the thread was taking, citations available, or the part his or her awkward posturing – i.e.
“All the other considerations about poetry and impossibility and divine movement are distractions. ” – played in the creation of that tone.
And now, Mr or Ms Q, after having set off the original powder and shot, you have the temerity to, at one and the same time, call me weird and floridly delusional, without addressing me directly, then complain to the site provider in a petulant manner that strangers are attacking you here.
The fact that you may be genuinely taken by surprise by the intensity of my responses speaks more to your insensitivity and lack of nuanced comprehension, than it does my delusional nature.
Not that there’s no substance to your accusations particularly, just that you haven’t got the place or weight to make them.
— msg Apr 24, 10:11pm # - Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh > I yam what I yam.
— eeksypeeksy Apr 29, 1:33am # - over and above the (mis)translation issues (http://saltation.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_saltation_archive.html#107942999617350937), there’s the whole elision issue wherein the bible we have today is missing a number of gospels deemed inappropriate and formally deleted back in the first few centuries AD.
you can’t take the bible as gospel, you know.
— Saltation May 1, 11:50am # - Are there side-by-side editions of the KJV and something more current and grounded in scholarship?
Because it seems to me that either one alone would be insufficient, if one wishes to understand not only an “original” meaning of the texts but how they have been traditionally used in the English-speaking world.
— Prentiss Riddle May 9, 12:12pm #
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