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Originally posted by Jengie Jon:
Scholarly ESV would do. There is a ESV Study Bible. This comes from a more conservative stable but it is a decent translation.

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Originally posted by Dinghy Sailor:

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Originally posted by Jengie Jon:
Scholarly ESV would do. There is a ESV Study Bible. This comes from a more conservative stable but it is a decent translation.

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I've heard nothing but praise for the ESV study bible. The Oxford Annotatd NRSV is also highly spoken of as a study bible.

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Originally posted by tclune
I agree with those who recommend the New Jerusalem bible for a translation. It strikes a wonderful balance between formal equivalence and readability. There is one version that has some notes, but the Catholics seem to shy away from study notes in general. You really won't find a full-blooded "study" version of this translation.

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Originally posted by LutheranChik:
I personally appreciate my New Interpreters NRSV Study Bible, although it was quite spendy.

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Originally posted by LutheranChik:
I personally appreciate my New Interpreters NRSV Study Bible, although it was quite spendy.

Some of my friends also recommend the Harper-Collins Study Bible, which is a trade paperback -- less expensive and easier to tote.

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Originally posted by Dinghy Sailor:

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Originally posted by Jengie Jon:
Scholarly ESV would do. There is a ESV Study Bible. This comes from a more conservative stable but it is a decent translation.

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I've heard nothing but praise for the ESV study bible.

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Originally posted by tclune:
The NIV was created by the most dishonest group of Biblical scholars ever to create a translation IMO.

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Originally posted by Squibs:
Oh dear, I was all set to buy the ESV Study Bible till TC torpedoed it.

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Originally posted by ken:
...t your fantasy about it being some sort of far-out evil Fundamentalist plot is really not relevant to advising someone else what Bble to read.

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He didn't torpedo it. He just said that it has too few pictures for him.

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Originally posted by Jessie Phillips:
Good study Bible? It's got to be The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha Augmented Third Edition New Revised Standard Version in my opinion.

Mind you, it would help if you could say what sort of things you are hoping to achieve from your Bible study. I don't think there's a single resource that caters for absolutely every whim of Bible-related curiosity that might ever cross my mind - so I have several study Bibles bulging out of my bookcase.

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He didn't torpedo it. He just said that it has too few pictures for him.

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If you want a Bible with pictures in it, I'd suggest the Lion Graphic Bible. I don't see the point in incidental pictures; if you're going to have pictures at all, it might as well be all the way through.

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Originally posted by Jessie Phillips:
Good study Bible? It's got to be The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha Augmented Third Edition New Revised Standard Version in my opinion.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
That's the main reason why I haven't purchased the latest Orthodox bible -- it's a new(ish) translation from the LXX, but it comes very heavily annotated. I've always felt it a bit dodgy to put commentary inside the same cover as holy writ -- too easy to forget they're two different things, and come away with the idea that what you read was what the Bible said, rather than an interpretation.

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Sola scriptura?Has our beloved mousethief fallen into the hands of a cult of Calvinists?

--Tom Clune

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Good study Bible? It's got to be The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha Augmented Third Edition New Revised Standard Version in my opinion.

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• Lots of cross refferences to parallel and related bits elsewhere.
• Some notes on different translations of key words.
• Brief discussion of key terms.
• some historical/chronological notes to put a whole book in context

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Originally posted by ken:
[qb]...t your fantasy about it being some sort of far-out evil Fundamentalist plot is really not relevant to advising someone else what Bble to read.

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Originally posted by Helen-Eva:

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Originally posted by ken:
... your fantasy about it being some sort of far-out evil Fundamentalist plot is really not relevant to advising someone else what Bble to read.

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I have an NIV which I have had since I was a teenager and which I bought because a) my friend doing religious studies A Level said it was good and b) it had pictures in. In my innocence I had no idea that suggestions of far-out evil Fundamentalist plots attached to it. In a spirit of only mild mischeviousness, if there are far-out Fundy Bibles, what is the translation going furthest the other direction along the continuum from fundamentalism? (the most liberal? the least literalist?)

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About the only thing that seems to be a hobby horse of conservaties is to substitute the text of the LXX for the Masoretic text in the places I indicated above. I think that is a foul practice -- our Easter Orthodox brethren have always maintained that the LXX is the right OT for Christians, and base their argument substantially upon the fact that the NT always quotes the LXX when it quotes the OT.

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Originally posted by The Silent Acolyte:
Please tell me it ain't so.

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Originally posted by tclune:

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Originally posted by The Silent Acolyte:
Please tell me it ain't so.

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It's so, kid.

--Tom Clune

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Originally posted by sebby:
The only translation that I simply had to push aside was the NEB which was stilted, archaic (on publication) and so very 60s. I shouldn't think anyone would refer to it now.

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Originally posted by The Silent Acolyte:
does that really mean that there are translators of the OT who happily munch through translating the Masoretic Text until they get to something quoted from the LXX by the NT, at which point they translate the LXX until the end of the quoted bit, at which point they return to the MT?

I did not know I led such a sheltered life. Please tell me it ain't so.

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Originally posted by tclune:
... The things that bother me about the NIV are the way that it distorts text to make it fit their theology. For example, when the NIV has Jesus say that the mustard seed is the smallest seed that you plant, it is adding words for no other reason than to "correct" God Himself! There is no hint at all of such wording from Christ. The only value of such things is that they protect literalism from obvious problems for a literalist mind. Maybe that isn't what God had in mind for His text...

The NIV injects these editorial sprucings-up throughout scripture without warning. Most translators, if they do such things, do them in a predictable way. Translators who insist on gender-inclusive language (a practice of which I personally disapprove -- save the editorializing for the footnotes) are pretty easy to anticipate. Whenever they write "brothers and sisters" or "friends of all gender persuasions" or whatever they wish the writer had said, it is pretty obvious.

But when the NIV inserts its rewrites, they can appear anywhere and for any reason that the NIV translation team thought was at odds with their understanding of what scripture ought to have said in order for their interpretation of scripture to be right. There is no predicting it, and the seldom even footnote their perfidy.
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This is not a characteristic specific to the NIV, but can be seen in any version of the bible translated following the ethos of dynamic equivalence, and most versions produced since the 1970s have followed this ethos. A full discussion of the pros and cons of dynamic equivalence (in contrast to ‘essentially literal’ translation) would take an extensive essay, even a book, so I won’t try.

But the two main principles of it could be summarised as: a) rather than keeping strictly to the words of the original, the translators try to get behind the words to the ‘thought’ of the original author and re-express those ‘thoughts’ in more comprehensible language; and b) the usage of the target language (the one being translated into) has absolute primacy, and if this means abandoning the usage and phraseology of the source language, then so be it. The foremost requirement is that the reader should be able to understand easily, rather than the original text being faithfully represented. To achieve this, the translators may insert words in order to explain what they think the text means, in addition to the words that the original author (/editor, etc.) actually wrote. (As objected to in the first para quoted above.)

There is now a whole range of translations showing a varying extent of use of the dynamic equivalence ethos, with the NIV at the conservative (or restrained) end, the GNB somewhere in the middle, and the New Living Translation (NLT) and The Message at the liberal (or enthusiastic) end. Indeed, the result has been a blurring of any distinction between translation and paraphrase (which is what the Living Bible was originally considered to be).

For me, finding out that the NIV used dynamic equivalence explained something that had been puzzling me for ages. When using my Greek/English Interlinear bible with accompanying NIV text, there were often discrepancies between the Greek text and the NIV. I put this down to the comment in the introduction that the NIV wasn’t exclusively based on the Nestle-Aland Greek text (which was the Greek version printed there), but used an eclectic mix of original texts. But I was wrong! It was because the translators had added or changed words in order to clarify (in their opinion) the meaning of the text they were translating.

Recently I have developed a deep-seated distrust and suspicion of all dynamic equivalence versions , and a key influence in that development was reading the book: The Word of God in English: Criteria for excellence in Bible Translation by Leland Ryken (Crossway, 2002) (More info on Amazon as usual, text also available as a free download for personal use here).

Ryken was the literary style editor for the ESV, (an ‘essentially literal’ translation) so it’s no surprise that his critique of dynamic equivalence is a robust one, but I found his arguments pretty convincing. I won’t try to reproduce them here, but I reckon from the quotation above that tclune would agree wholeheartedly with them, too. I would describe this book as the most outstandingly enlightening book that I have read in the last 10 years.

However, the debate on the subject is a lively one, with proponents of both sides of the argument having strongly-held views. On the one side is the opinion that making the Word of God accessible and understandable to the modern mind is a very worthwhile activity, while on the other is the opinion that trying to re-write the bible by getting inside the heads of the original authors (etc.) and re-expressing what you think they meant to say but didn’t actually do so, is to distort the Word of God from its original expression. My preference is to have an accurate representation of the original text that I struggle to understand, rather than a version that is made clearly understandable by simplification, re-phrasing and insertion, but which fails to convey the ambiguities, subtleties, metaphors and imagery of the original. (As ever, other opinions may vary.)

To try desperately to bring this post back on topic, I would reckon that a bible version for in-depth study, using commentaries and maybe venturing into the Hebrew and Greek texts, would best be an essentially literal version. While reading Ryken’s book, I compiled a list of translations which I understood to be done on the principle of ‘essentially literal’ or ‘optimal equivalence’, so for the information of shipmates I’ll reproduce it here: KJV (1611); RV (1881-1885); American Standard Version (1901); RSV (1946-1957); NASB (1971); NKJV (1982); NASB(Updated) (1995); ESV (2001); Holman Christian Standard Bible (2004). Nine in 400 years. Not many, is it? Though there may be others I don’t know about.

The editorial decision of the translators of the NRSV to eliminate gender-specific language means that I don’t reckon it to be ‘essentially literal’, as it is a practise whereby the usage of the target language overrules the original phraseology. I have great respect for the NET bible, as the footnotes and translation notes are awe-inspiring, but the same gender-neutralising tinkering as the NRSV disqualifies it from the list. Though it does have the honesty to footnote the original gender-specific word in each case, and reading the introduction to the translation will give a good taster of the intricacies of bible translation technicalities. (Again, the issue of gender-specific language will provoke strong contrasting opinions.)

AFAIK all other bible versions since the 1970s have used dynamic equivalence as their basic translation ethos (though that statement may render me a hostage to contradiction). And what one will tend to get from comparing a biblical passage in different dynamic versions is a growing sense of confusion, as each of the translation teams tries to re-express their understanding of what the author (etc.) meant – and all of them do so in different ways, and in doing so perhaps distort the text to fit in with their theology (see quote para.1 above). Ryken refers to this as ‘destabilisation of the text’.

Amazingly enough, the most literal translation that I have ever read, where the structure of the Greek text is substantially preserved, is Tyndale’s NT of 1534 (this edition). And I don’t find it at all difficult to understand.

I really must stop there.

Angus