Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered • Hacker News Board

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#231

Post by gumby » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

goto11 wrote: post #146

gumby wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just to be clear, the oldest texts unambiguously condemns male-on-male sex under penalty of death: "If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads." (NIV translation https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+20%3A... ) The translation just doesn't use the specific word "homos…

Interesting that you chose a modern translation (1973). I just randomly scrolled to another (the orthodox jewish bible) and it says no such thing: "If an ish also lie with zachar, as he lieth with an isha..." So I don't think you can say "just to be clear"

I am neither gay nor part of any religion so I don't have a dog in this fight. But I am interested in hermeneutic philosophy, translation, and, separately, the nature of disagreement.

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#232

Post by jamesgeck0 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

aetherspawn wrote: post #170

goto11 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the Jehovas Witness translation? The word Jehova is itself a mistaken translation.

It agrees with the Byington translation, as well as early King James versions and many other translations in that respect. But the most interesting testament to the accuracy of the NWT, I think, is that it uses parallel translations of texts from the era in languages other than Greek and Hebrew (for example Sumerian) that have definite article. This means that scriptures that are ambiguous due to the lack of grammati…

NWT apologists often fail to mention that the Byington translation was published exclusively by Watch Tower until the copyright expired. I personally suspect they published it for the sole reason of justifying translation errors in the NWT.

> The same constructs elsewhere are assumed in most translations based on context, but modern context is based on doctrine, and doctrine is uninteresting for literary science.

Context determines meaning. If you discard context you cannot translate documents accurately, in any language. The NWT has the worst of both worlds. It discards the context of the original document in order to support doctrine. This can be seen in John 1:1. The language is not particularly ambiguous. https://carm.org/john-1-1-word-was-god

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#233

Post by dang » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

etxm wrote: post #211

dang wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please keep religious flamewar off HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How about keep religion off HN?

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? You've done a lot of that, and it's not what this site is for.

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

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Post by blotter_paper » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:37 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #227

blotter_paper wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is what's being expressed, but I think I'd have an easier time revising KJV than Shakespeare. The pieces of translated bible that I have read didn't come anywhere near the complexities of Shakespeare. I don't think anyone would read/accept my revision, but I think it would be more beautiful in the eyes of most English professors. "I returned. Under the sun I saw that the race was not for the swift,…

There is a lot of crufty old stuff in Shakespeare, the stories are re-written pretty much yearly pretty much all omitting this stuff. I'm not a part of that world, but I'd be pretty surprised if theater companies that regularly run Shakespeare plays weren't revising the plays in that regard.

I believe that Shakespeare had more rhyme and meter than the bible. I also believe that text with more rhyme and meter is more difficult to edit without damaging these qualities, while text with less rhyme and meter has less to damage by these metrics and is therefore easier to edit. Do you agree with both of these statements? If so, do you think the bible has other complexities Shakespeare lacks which outweigh the complexity added by Shakespeare's rhyme and meter? If so, what are those qualities?

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#235

Post by vinceguidry » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

blotter_paper wrote: post #234

vinceguidry wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of crufty old stuff in Shakespeare, the stories are re-written pretty much yearly pretty much all omitting this stuff. I'm not a part of that world, but I'd be pretty surprised if theater companies that regularly run Shakespeare plays weren't revising the plays in that regard.

I believe that Shakespeare had more rhyme and meter than the bible. I also believe that text with more rhyme and meter is more difficult to edit without damaging these qualities, while text with less rhyme and meter has less to damage by these metrics and is therefore easier to edit. Do you agree with both of these statements? If so, do you think the bible has other complexities Shakespeare lacks which outweigh the c…

Oh dear I'm certainly not prepared to dive that deep into the topic. I was more referring to the content rather than the specific qualities of the verse. The Bible is surprisingly hard to compress. Shakespeare, well you can make two hour long movies that hit all the story beats.

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#236

Post by FiatLuxDave » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

emmelaich wrote: post #157

tyingq wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karnac says you're 54ish and from the Northeast US or Ireland or maybe UK ;) I suspect not US, which makes the shared experience more interesting, as the world in general wasn't particularly very global at the time, yet we have a remarkably shared experience (I'm EU born, US bred). Yay early (late 80's / early 90's) Internet. This is one of those rare HN moments that I wish more would notice.

What is karnac? A brief websearch was not enlightening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnac_the_Magnificent

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#237

Post by mikestew » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

dooglius wrote: post #205

yati wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a native English speaker. To me, your first excerpt is much more understandable: I can automatically form the abstraction given these examples, whereas the second excerpt, although more general, is honestly harder to "hammer" into the brain. But I think that is because the second version is not just modern language, but also more abstract.

As a counterpoint, I'm a native English speaker, and I found the second much easier to understand, whereas the first seemed like a maze.

As a former hard-core Bible reader, but never a fan of the KJV, I found the first easier. But I think that could be because it follows closely to the patterns of the Zen Buddhist literature I'm reading lately. 'cuz it does read kind of like a Zen koan.

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#238

Post by ImpressiveWebs » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 8:33 PM UTC

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #232

aetherspawn wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It agrees with the Byington translation, as well as early King James versions and many other translations in that respect. But the most interesting testament to the accuracy of the NWT, I think, is that it uses parallel translations of texts from the era in languages other than Greek and Hebrew (for example Sumerian) that have definite article. This means that scriptures that are ambiguous due to the lack of grammati…

NWT apologists often fail to mention that the Byington translation was published exclusively by Watch Tower until the copyright expired. I personally suspect they published it for the sole reason of justifying translation errors in the NWT. > The same constructs elsewhere are assumed in most translations based on context, but modern context is based on doctrine, and doctrine is uninteresting for literary science. Con…

Matt Slick, the author of that article, is one of the worst Bible commentators you’ll find. He has zero credibility and does not understand Greek grammar. The NWT is correct and does not discard the context, which says that the Word was “with God”, and therefore could not be God.

John 1:1 is one of the easiest verses to translate, yet most translations get it wrong because they are biased towards the Trinity or Oneness doctrines.

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

#239

Post by marshray » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #208

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can understand why, the meaning of the NT goes pretty hard against established religion as it cuts priests out of the loop entirely. It also has a very strong, communist/shared wealth message. If you're rich or powerful and don't believe it would be anathema. Letting just anyone read that ...

There's also a whole lot of "give unto Cesar what is Cesar's," and some "come on guys, don't start the Jewish-Roman wars, they're going to be a bad idea." I don't see why rich people should be bothered by that.

There's no comparison in the degree, but Manning, Assange, and Snowden are perhaps recent examples of radical who argued that individuals should be able to read the raw source text used to justify the structure of society (not to mention wars in the M.E.).

Re: Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

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Post by tyingq » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 12:53 AM UTC

C1sc0cat wrote: post #200

tyingq wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too fragmented for that to really be a first class concern. "Christian" is a broad class that encompasses LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses, Presbyterian, Baptist, Catholic, etc. We have no shortage of controversy and conflict to debate about. On this particular topic, I'd be more interested in the Italian opinion.

Um not sure about all of those being "technically" "Christian"

Curious why you think that. From my POV, they are all very "Christian".