On Bibles

The Browser discusses five Bibles with Timothy Beal, Florence Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University.

From the piece...

Your first choice is The New Oxford Annotated Bible.

I teach biblical studies at a secular university and I use this version a lot. It’s the standard critical edition for academic study, but many people use it for personal reasons. It uses the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation, which I think is among the best.

Do you mean the most accurate?

‘Accurate’ is a problematic word when talking about biblical translations. We don’t have a single original Hebrew or Greek source for anyof the books of the Bible, let alone the Bible as a whole. There are many different manuscripts. The people who produce these translations work in large committees of language and biblical scholars. Some are Christian, some are Jewish and some aren’t religious at all. They sort through the manuscript evidence and decide which texts to use and translate.

Do you understand Greek and Hebrew?

Yes, I read and translate them.

And are parts of the Bible in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke?

Some of Daniel and Ezra are in Aramaic. Aramaic is closely related to Hebrew and looks the same. There are some differences in vocabulary and grammatical forms. The translation committees also look at the early biblical manuscripts in other languages. For example, the apocryphal texts are in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the Syriac and Arabic versions.

Sorry, you were talking about the NRSV translation…

There’s a kind of lineage from the Geneva Bible and the King James Version to the Revised Version Bible of 1885. The Revised Standard Version is a mid-20th century revision of the Revised Version. The New Revised Standard Version was published in 1989 and has a flavour of the familiar King James English.

There are many translations out there, including ‘functional equivalent’ ones. These are where you might take a sentence, or even a whole paragraph, from the Greek and put it into modern English. It becomes extremely hard to know what’s behind it. ‘My cup runneth over’ becomes ‘you blow me away.’

Eek.


Also, on the Guardian, the King James Bible is discussed, here.

Also, if you want to find a Bible that promotes adultery, look no further!