Which version of the Bible should I buy?

Snigger

Snigger

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I'm looking to purchase a bible, not for religious reasons, but I've never fully read it and I want to learn more about Christian culture.
Which version should I get?
 
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Definitely not King James, it's incomprehensible due to it's archaic language and also is known for being slanted to make points they wanted to make at the time it was written. Today I downloaded an NIV, and so far it seems like a good compromise between communication of the ideas and poetic value.

But it all pales in comparison to Da Jesus Book.
 

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Snigger said:
I'm just worried about the meaning being lost by translation, but I also don't want to slog through archaic tongue, it's a fine balance. I'm also concerned about Orthodox vs Catholic vs Protestant
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You're looking at this entirely wrong if you think the differences from those groups stem from translations of the bible. The vast majority of people within those groups don't read the bible almost at all, and the Catholic church is basically open about the fact that most of its doctrines barely have anything to do with the source material (which is a good thing, it gives them license to apply common sense).
 
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Michael Pemulis said:
Definitely not King James, it's incomprehensible due to it's archaic language and also is known for being slanted to make points they wanted to make at the time it was written. Today I downloaded an NIV, and so far it seems like a good compromise between communication of the ideas and poetic value.

But it all pales in comparison to Da Jesus Book.
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you can get the nkjv which modernizes the thees and thous while keeping the overall translation. kjv has the superior psalter translation. the new revised standard version is pretty good too.

niv and a lot of the newer translations push for a gender neutral approach - replacing "forefathers" with whatever the neutral versions they come up with.

the esv is ok if you want a dry academic translation.
 
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This article outlines why I prefer the KJV. In terms of understanding Christian theology, it'll suit your purpose.

TL;DR: it's the closest to the original manuscripts as you can get and those manuscripts were the standard for nearly two-thousand years until they were reexamined by faulty processes.
 
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eDove said:
This article outlines why I prefer the KJV. In terms of understanding Christian theology, it'll suit your purpose.

TL;DR: it's the closest to the original manuscripts as you can get and those manuscripts were the standard for nearly two-thousand years until they were reexamined by faulty processes.
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Wow, what a complete load. It's a long article, but let me make a few comments on the worst parts.

The New Testament is demonstrably, PROVABLY, NOT perfectly preserved. Critical reconstruction can get us 99.99999% of the way there, and there's nothing particularly import that's in dispute over textual issues. But there are a handful of things we don't know, and will probably never know (long ending of Mark, say). There are MANY differences in various manuscripts, and there's absolutely no reason to privilege the ones used for the KJV.

Now I don't want to shit all over the KJV translators. For the most part they were genuinely doing the best they could with what they had. But they used those manuscripts not because they had some high status but because it was all they had. The entire KJV was based on something like 5 Hebrew and 11 Greek manuscripts (those numbers may be slightly off, but not by much). The current critical text, the Nestle-Aland, is based on thousands of manuscripts.

Their section about critical methods are fragmentary and seriously misleading. The method favored by the article naively supports a numerical majority rather than serious analysis. You know why majority texts end up being wrong sometimes? Because the alteration is made early, future scribes copied it, and the old copies got lost and destroyed over time. (Anybody who compares this to a game of Telephone will be shot. That's not how it works. But corruptions happen.) People much more advanced than me who do this sort of thing for a living can actually trace something like a genealogy of a text, figuring out who copied what and where one or another change was made.

Shorter readings are preferred because it's more likely that somebody added words than took them away. More difficult or controversial readings are preferred because nobody is going to intentionally make the text more controversial, but it's easy to see how they'd alter it to smooth over controversy. Now sometimes people can do historical criticism of the Bible in retarded ways (Jesus Seminar types), but textual criticism is pretty damn well understood and agreed upon regardless of theology.
 
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Lord of the Large Pants said:
Wow, what a complete load. It's a long article, but let me make a few comments on the worst parts.

The New Testament is demonstrably, PROVABLY, NOT perfectly preserved. Critical reconstruction can get us 99.99999% of the way there, and there's nothing particularly import that's in dispute over textual issues. But there are a handful of things we don't know, and will probably never know (long ending of Mark, say). There are MANY differences in various manuscripts, and there's absolutely no reason to privilege the ones used for the KJV.

Now I don't want to shit all over the KJV translators. For the most part they were genuinely doing the best they could with what they had. But they used those manuscripts not because they had some high status but because it was all they had. The entire KJV was based on something like 5 Hebrew and 11 Greek manuscripts (those numbers may be slightly off, but not by much). The current critical text, the Nestle-Aland, is based on thousands of manuscripts.

Their section about critical methods are fragmentary and seriously misleading. The method favored by the article naively supports a numerical majority rather than serious analysis. You know why majority texts end up being wrong sometimes? Because the alteration is made early, future scribes copied it, and the old copies got lost and destroyed over time. (Anybody who compares this to a game of Telephone will be shot. That's not how it works. But corruptions happen.) People much more advanced than me who do this sort of thing for a living can actually trace something like a genealogy of a text, figuring out who copied what and where one or another change was made.

Shorter readings are preferred because it's more likely that somebody added words than took them away. More difficult or controversial readings are preferred because nobody is going to intentionally make the text more controversial, but it's easy to see how they'd alter it to smooth over controversy. Now sometimes people can do historical criticism of the Bible in retarded ways (Jesus Seminar types), but textual criticism is pretty damn well understood and agreed upon regardless of theology.
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If the Bible wasn't perfectly preserved throughout history, then the God of the Bible is an incompetent liar and is not worthy of being worshipped. That's how I see it.
 
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