Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Someone Asked What Version Of The Bible People Use

KJV, Revised Standard, New American Standard, Today's English Version (officially approved by the RCC 1993), Abegg-Flint-Ulrich Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, the Coptic-English-French critical edition of the Gospel of Judas et al by Kasser et al, the Casiodoro de Reina Santa Biblia, theTraduction œcuménique de la Bible, Bijbel: vertaling in opdracht van het Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap bewerkt door de Daartoe Benoemde Commissies, vol 3 of the Expositor's Greek Testament ed by Nicoli, some Russian version, some Syriac version, Die Heilige Schrift uebersetzt von Menge, some Armenian version, the Rahlfs-Hahnart Septuaginta, edito altera, the 4th edition (1994) of the Stuttgart Vulgate, and the 27th edition, 5th, corrected printing, of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament.

I think that's all of them for now. Sure would like the Gothic Bible. And a Luther Bible with the actual 16th-century orthography. And a Georgian bible. And Ethiopic. And Coptic (all I have in Coptic now are, as mentioned above, the few apocryphal works from the Codex Tchacos).

PS: To try to cheer myself up from all the homophobes and book-burners and other morons responding in the thread ("Any version is good for tinder, heh heh heh." "Queen James was completely gay, heh heh heh." "I rely on the FSM archives, heh heh heh." "I use the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, so I'm protected at all times from religious cooties, heh heh heh." Etc. Risu inepto res ineptior nulla est.), I went ahead and ordered a copy of the Gothic Bible from Amazon, so add that to my list.

(4th-century Gothic. More than 400 years older than the next-oldest thing written in any Germanic language. One thing I've come to understand by studying history is that new things don't occur to most people naturally; someone has to do a new and strange thing, and then people become accustomed to the idea, or they don't, and if they don't the thing may not be done again for a long time. In Western Europe in the 4th century, they spoke whatever language they spoke, a Germanic language in some cases, and either they knew how to write in Latin, plus Greek in a few cases, or they didn't write. It didn't occur to people that there was any reason to write anything in any Germanic languages. Except for this one guy who translated the Bible into Gothic. And then 400 years later, around AD 800, as a part of his massive support of education which mostly meant education in Latin, Charlemagne encouraged some people to write some things in German, the first things written in German. And the writing in the Germanic languages still didn't really catch on until after AD 1000.)

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