This year some people in my small group decided to start an attempt at reading the entire Bible in one year, and I figured it was good time to finally do something I've been meaning to do for years anyway. In the process so far, I've been coming across a lot of ideas that I never would've considered or thought of the first time I read some of these books, so I guess you could say I'm starting a series of posts here to chronicle thoughts and findings along the way.
The one (or was it several?) times I tried this in the past, I was only able to get up to the point in Exodus where the laws suddenly start popping up... but I was also at an age where I figured that all of the instances in Genesis of people "sleeping together" meant that they literally slept on the same bed together, and then *poof* the wife just magically got pregnant... so I'm really getting a completely different perspective in on this run-through now. -_-
We're going through a chronological plan of the Bible (in the order the events supposedly happened) organized by the Blue Letter Bible; if you have a smartphone it's on the YouVersion Bible app. I have to admit, however, that the ordering doesn't feel entirely accurate already. The entirety of the book of Job is read before Abraham's story in Genesis, but Job has references to Rahab (who doesn't exist until Judges - although you could argue that it was inserted by the author, who existed post-Rahab) and one of Job's friends is supposedly a descendant of Abraham's grandson, Esau. Eh, whatever works, I guess.
I'm hoping that all of the years that have passed since my first attempt will have provided me better "insight" (and hearty skepticism! ish.) into reading now, but just in case, I'm doing some follow-up research on the side online and with commentary from my New Interpreter's Study Bible. Trying to keep it at mostly layman-accessible stuff. Over the past year, I've grown more interested in understanding how other traditions (my background is non-denom Protestant) have interpreted Scripture, particularly the Orthodox and Jewish faiths for historical reasons, so I'll be looking into commentary from those sides as well later on.
But anyway, for starters... the neverending Bible version debate. I randomly went on a semi-personal/research tangent with this.
- From the Protestant side: I grew up on the NIV (with memorization from the KJV sometimes) in elementary school, and I still have the copy of the NIV study Bible I used in middle school sitting with my other books right now. Since high school, though, I've been finding myself more distancing away from them for various reasons (a desire for more accuracy to the original texts and less Protestant evangelical bias/editorial agenda controversy... although most of the widely read versions I know of still fall under the mainline Protestant tradition).
For versions under the more formal equivalent (literal)-Tyndale (revisions since KJV) tradition: I recall my old apartment-mate Mark telling me that he thought the NASB was the least "blasphemous", as it does happen to be the most literal-to-the-source English one out there. Regen had the ESV on its pews, which I liked a lot and am currently using for a first pass-through before re-reading; it's a bit more readable in comparison while still being fairly literal. In Mark Study we used the NRSV, which is less literal than the previous two, and it's considered more liberal for its use of gender inclusive language and emphasis on translating based on the original historical context of the text rather than the traditional evangelical interpretation of it (the ESV was commissioned in part as a conservative reaction to it). That said, it seems to be the best version for serious academic study for being ecumenical, including Jewish, Catholic, and Orthodox representation in the people who worked on it. Not to mention, both the New Oxford Annotated and the New Interpreter's use it, and it also normally includes the Apochrypha used in the Catholic/Orthodox canon. I'm doing a second-pass/mainly commentary reading based off this one, just cause it reveals a lot of stuff in the text I would've never considered otherwise.
I haven't looked at other versions in as much depth yet, but for more recent non-Tyndale tradition translations with moderate dynamic equivalence (between literal and thought-for-thought) that aren't NIV related, both the HCSB and the NET look pretty good; the NET actually has the most abundant and in-depth translator's notes I've ever seen in a version outside of a study bible.
- From the Orthodox side, the two things that separate their versions from the other denominational translations is their reliance on the Septuagint for the OT (the Greek translation of the OT - the other versions I've listed rely predominantly on a version of the Jewish Masoretic Text, which came after. considering that the original NT authors actually quoted from the Septuagint whenever they referenced the OT and not the Hebrew, it makes more sense), and on Byzantine text-types for the NT that are currently used in the Orthodox Church itself (aside from the KJV/NKJV, the other versions I've listed rely on another text that focuses more on the generally older but less common Alexandrian text-types). For this, I'm mainly looking at the EOB, which came out recently. There's also the Orthodox Study Bible, although some Orthodox find that it has too much Protestant influence from primarily relying on the NKJV and having been worked on by people who were Protestant->Orthodox converts.
- From the Jewish perspective, it seems the most popular English translations of the Tanakh(MT) are the nJPS and Judaica Press translations. The latter comes included with commentary from Rashi, which is the most complete English translation of a Jewish commentary out there as far as I've heard.
-I'm personally not as interested in reading a Catholic Bible (for reasons better left in another post - more to do with Catholicism itself, although that may change later on), but I hear that aside from the Catholic editions of the RSV/NRSV, the NJB and NAB are largely used (the former is widely used in Europe; the latter is the most used in America for Mass readings).
More to come later.
No comments:
Post a Comment