Lugubert

Jinksy,

You wouldn't need more than a handful of European languages to see that there are just so many different renderings. In a more serious vein, I would suggest Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic (which isn't too much different from Hebrew) and koine Greek - not the Greek of the classical authors, nor modern Greek. You won't need to be an expert in those languages to be able to understand commentaries of people who are.

Magdlyn

You might want to google "king james bible inaccurate." I did and came up with this:

http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/kjverror.html

mrmoderate

For just this purpose I use multiple bibles for study. I like the KJV mostly for it's poetic verse but feel it is difficult to understand due to it's Old English style.

The Strong's Bible Concordance is based on the kJV and lists every word, it's perceived meaning and the Hebrew and Greek original word that was translated. By using the Strong's Concordance I can verify word usage by passage from the KJV and compare it to passages from easier to read bibles such as the NIV.

Think about how many words have multiple meanings which may change according to cultural standards of certain times. If we were to write "He has a really cool shirt.", how might that sentence be interpreted thousands of years from now? Let's say in the future we have translations of the word "cool" that do not contain the slang usage. In this case our future generations may believe that the author of that sentence was describing a material that kept its owner "cool" as in "not hot". Since they may know that cotton is an absobent material that evaporates moisture from the skin thus making the skin feel cooled it is not unreasonable to believe that that sentence may wind up being translated to "He has a cotton shirt."

Once in a while we dig up evidence that a certain word translates differently than we previously believed at a certain time that that word was to have been used. This is when we gather more understanding of ancient literature such as the bible.

Clutch

There is no straightforward collection of expertise that makes for correctly judging which translation is more "accurate". Accuracy is a fraught notion here, because it can apply to various goals in translation, and for each such goal it can apply at different levels of analysis. Do you want a translation that proceeds from lexical and phrasal direct translation, with as little revision for idiom and syntactic constraints as possible? Or do you want a document which, overall, has the same communicative effects in the new language as the original document has (or had?) in the original language? Do you want "literal" meaning? At the lexical level? The sentential level? Do you want accurate preservation of rhyme, meter, tone, truth-value, doctrine? Which should you give up to preserve others, and under what circumstances?

The point is, there are no grounds for making any judgement about which translation is better, tout court, without taking a stand on these and other methodological questions.

jbernier

An example might help illustrate the problems of translation and why the original question is really impossible to answer. When I took first year Classical Greek we were given a sentence to translate. I will not reproduce the Greek sentence here, primarily because the textbook is sitting in my office right now. However one could either translate it as "The men loaded the horses upon the boat" or "The horses loaded the men upon the boat." Now, each was fully correct grammatically - but they have opposite meanings. In this case the correct meaning is fairly obvious as horses rarely load men unto boats; but even then, what if the story was somewhat of satire which was describing what the world would be like if ponies rode men and the world was turned upside down (as the old English song goes)? Either way, in other situations it might not be so obvious and the translator must make a call (just as I had to make a call when I rendered it as "The men loaded the horses upon the boat").

Dean Anderson

What's so bad about the Textus Receptus?

(I'm not looking for an argument here, I'm just curious)

Mary.

When I want to understand the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible as the Jews understand it, I consult the JPS translation of the Tanakh. (They sell them at Amazon.com - the paperback is only $14.) For everything else, I use an annotated NRSV. I've looked at various translations, but find little significant differences when I compare the same verse between them.

Two good sources to look in to compare passages are:

The Bible Gateway

and "The Interpreter's Bible," a multi-volume set at my local library, which compares the KJV with the RSV, and includes articles and exegesis on all passages.

Mary.

Evangelion

I prefer the New English Translation myself.

Evangelion

Not much. A few textual interpolations; a few dodgy renditions that would later be cleared up by the discovery of new texts.

That sort of thing.

DeepWaters

Isn't the KJV the most violent and graphic in its descriptions and language? When I read the NIV, it seems as if it has been made 'milder' in its content than the KJV. It almost makes me suspicious of newer versions that they are trying to 'water down' or cover up the atrocities in the KJV. Has anyone else noticed this?