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Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

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Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#131

Post by [deleted] »

RandomBacon wrote: post #77
imjustsaying wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any translation has a profound impact on the way the bible is perceived, so perhaps it is worthwhile to look directly at the source. Take this famous opener in the KJV bible for example: John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Well just what does it mean by Word? Turns out this is Koine Greek λόγος, logos. Logos not only means word, but it importantly also means reas…

"reasoning, order, and logic" still make sense to me because I believe in theistic evolution - evolution is basically a tool that God used to get us where we are today. There is also Pandeism (where basically God ceased to exist because he became the universe). Scott Adam's book God Debris touches on this. FYI, (I'm not Catholic, but) the Catholic Church today holds that view that Science explains the how, and Religi…

[deleted]

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#132

Post by giancarlostoro »

sb057 wrote: post #129
giancarlostoro wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair warning: Brace yourself. It sounds on-topic enough. After years of being a Christian and reading and studying a number of Bibles and studying a bit of Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek (in order to read the source material, even if it's just to study simple words or phrases) I've got a few translations that are noteworthy. The most noteworthy for me is the Cepher Bible[0]. This one is pricey, but it covers everyth…

>"I am the Alpha and Omega" well this translation in Greek makes no sense It makes perfect sense; alpha and omega were the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet at the time. It's equivalent to the modern English phrase "A to Z".

Makes more sense to a Greek than an Israelite maybe. But it loses its deeper meaning where He once again calls Himself the Word just like how the Gospel of John starts.

Edit: When you see how often the Aleph Tav is in the Old Testament. It is insane. It is all over. And it has deep meaning when studied further. It is even in the first verse of Genesis.

The Aleph Tav gets even deeper when you study the Paleo / Pictographic Hebrew:

https://www.cepher.net/what-is-the-aleph-tav.aspx

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#133

Post by crgwbr »

Crontab wrote: post #15

This may be off-topic but is there any consensus on what is the most accurate translation of the bible into English?

I’m personally a fan of the New World Translation [1]. It was first released in English, but has since been released in about 160 other languages as well.

[1]: https://www.jw.org/en/library/bible/study-bible/books/

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#134

Post by giancarlostoro »

sb057 wrote: post #22
Crontab wrote: post #15

This may be off-topic but is there any consensus on what is the most accurate translation of the bible into English?

My personal preference (for accuracy, anyway) is Thomas Nelson's "The Expanded Bible", which provides alternate and literal translations, as well as important commentary (such as "wind" and "spirit" being the same word in Greek). No deuterocanon, unfortunately!

That is a nice translation available under Bible software based on the SWORD project if I remember correctly. I too like to use that one from time to time.

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#135

Post by giancarlostoro »

vlozko wrote: post #106
Crontab wrote: post #15

This may be off-topic but is there any consensus on what is the most accurate translation of the bible into English?

Short story: it’s complicated. But if you want to read up on something really fascinating about using technology to get the most accurate translation, look into CGBM: https://www.uni-muenster.de/INTF/Genealogical_method.html

Look into the Peshitta Bible. Whilst Greek manuscripts have come and gone. The Peshitta has remained untouched as far back as it goes.

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#136

Post by maxlybbert »

war1025 wrote: post #111
maxlybbert wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My “to-read” list is too long, so I haven’t actually read it, but personally I’m interested in “The Art of Bible Translation” by Robert Alter.

Heard an interview with this guy on NPR about a year ago [1]. He made some comment about how he tried to make it more poetic than most translations. Then proceeded to give several examples where his translation sounded distinctly more awkward to me than the text he was replacing. For example, replacing "anoint" with "moisten" and "soul" with "life breath". [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/01/14/684120470/after-24-years-s…

I don’t remember how I learned about that book at all. But I appreciate having another data point about the author. Thank you.

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#137

Post by nemosaltat »

chrismorgan wrote: post #64
gerbilly wrote: post #51

Does anyone know whether or not the language of the king James bible was typical of early 17th century English? I heard that the translators use archaic expressions no longer commonly used in 1604 for stylistic reasons.

Compare it with Tyndale’s translation from about eighty years earlier (normalising the spelling of both), and, where they vary, Tyndale’s is normally the easier to read and understand. Tyndale intended that the ploughboy could understand the Scripture, while the KJV was “appointed to be read in Churches”. (Most of the time they do not differ substantially, as the KJV drew most heavily from Tyndale’s translation.) See…

IIRC Tyndale was burned at the stake for his efforts.

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#138

Post by nitrogen »

haskal wrote: post #104
mc32 wrote: post #8

Obviously it’s interesting to religious people and people who study religion. But, on top of that it’s an important document of the English language at that time. So it’s got linguistic interest as well. But that’s the case for many historic religious texts. One has to do with religion the other is the linguistic aspect. Of course there are other areas of interest like culture and so on.

The bible is by far the most translated text (and a reasonably sized one). I just wish it wasn't written in a weird way. I learned a little bit of Korean by reading the bible as the primary source and when I tried to speak, I only got weird looks. I get why. It is like someone asking you "How art thou?"

I tried something similar to learn Samoan, but didn't get far. I would compare some phrases in English and Samoan, then ask native speakers what a confusing word meant. I stopped pretty quickly because I found that a phrase made of three words might mean "tree", but if you just take the first word alone it means something extremely vulgar (I couldn't get anyone to tell me what).

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#139

Post by nitrogen »

jazoom wrote: post #114
mindcrime wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask for the same level of self-restrain from you when using adjetives about the quality of the bible and similar kind of opinions. Note that the person you're replying to did not say that the bible was ALL timeless wisdom, or really say much at all about the overall quality of the bible. There's no contradiction between the bible containing lots of timeless wisdom AND containing lots of utter nonsense and complete…

Yeah, New Testament is a fair bit nicer.

Though as I recall the old testament has more quotably poetic one-liners.

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#140

Post by edflsafoiewq »

gumby wrote: post #73
Crontab wrote: post #15

This may be off-topic but is there any consensus on what is the most accurate translation of the bible into English?

Not only is there to such consensus, but there is an important (important beyond religious issues) lack of consensus of what is the most accurate text to be translated. Modern societies weren't the first to find absurdities and contradictions in holy texts. Early scholars decided to search for the "actual" underlying meaning. For if the gods are infallible, and failures in the text must be human failures trying to tr…

The prohibition on homosexual intercourse is ancient. What your [2] says is that the word "homosexuality" did not appear in an English Bible until 1946, which is unsurprising, since the word didn't even enter the English language until the end of the 19th century.

Also your [2] is highly eisegetical.

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