hjalti

And when a spirit goes "eis" Jesus he goes "upon" him, but when spirits go "eis" someone or something else, they go "into" them. Should we add Mark 1:10 to the list, spin?

spin

The extremes of approaches I mentioned before were over-literal and over-interpretative. For my use this text is over-interpretative. The translators are trying to get to what they think was the intention of the writer. It could be a reasonable attempt to get to that meaning, but it is of no use to me as it makes the original text more opaque.

The over-interpretative nature of the work is also more liable to reflect the opinions of the translators, but then all translations more or less reflect those opinions.

The vast majority of exemplars have επ which yields "(up)on" in English. Nestle-Aland goes for εις against Sinaiticus. (I think because of things like the KJV of this verse, it is idiomatic in English to talk of things like spirits and ghosts "descending upon" rather than "descending into".)

sweetpea7

Spin and others who seriously study the Bible: What translation would you suggest for in-depth college level Bible reading/study? The couple of college classes I took required the New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, and that is what I typically use. Is there a better one?

sweetpea7

Do you know of a translation of the standard Christian canon that is not done by Christians? I am unaware of one.

Here is an article re: Bible translation that I found helpful. I didn't have time this morning to read it in-depth, but it seemed to offer some good info.

http://geneva.rutgers.edu/src/faq/translations.html

avi

http://ebible.org/

avi

Iskander

Why is it that this forum makes me laugh? I wonder.

Sheshbazzar

Thank you for putting in so few words what I was attempting to convey concerning the CEB, (without my load of anger, frustration, and anti-Christian bias)
Perhaps a 'good enough' version for the 'everyday' church goer or the average Christian 'Bible student' but not accurate enough for usage within critical scholarship, where even the difference of a letter, or an inflection created by the original compositions syntax can have a dramatic impact upon what was intended by the original text, and upon how it ought to be translated/interpreted.
(as for example "....I will require it of him" (Deut 18:19) whom is intended by the 'him'? Joshua? or the the 'whosoever'??
Different versions provide different translations and interpretations.
(see my comments on this here. Where each of the two possible interpretations of that one final inflection can lend a dramatically different interpretation to volumes of additional texts.)
Although I own about a dozen paper Bibles, and multiple Concordances, I seldom ever take them off the shelves anymore.
(I used to study with a half-dozen Bibles laid out side by side, and assisted by a Concordance or two, supplemented by various 'Commentaries'......very clumsy, space gobbing and hugely inconvenient. and still often lacking or incorrect.)

Nowadays I use the Internet and The Blue Letter Bible which in a single source gives me the Masoretic Hebrew text, The LXX text, and 16 different Bible's versions of every verse, plus immediate access to each individual word, in Hebrew and Greek and each entire verse it occurs in the Bible (provides context) as well as the Concordance of every translation/interpretation used within The KJV.
All at a finger tip and requiring only seconds. And if that dosen't provide enough, type in few search words and a thousand more resources are immediately available.... sure beats 'the old days' when I would send out a money-order and have to wait weeks for a single rare or foreign book to arrive by snail-mail.

Then of course as I have already demonstrated within this thread, one may use the 'net to bring up The Bible in practically any version or language it has been translated into.
Paper Bible's, even brand new ones, are already antiques, now more a culturally symbolic icon than useful tools.
(In church, the preacher is going to tell them what (he thinks) it says, and what that church holds to be its meaning...so it really dosen't matter how their Bibles might actually read)

Paper Bibles are (in my view) becoming the albatross hung about the necks of the retrograde.





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hjalti

Darn you spin! Why don't you just unquesitonably accept all my assertions! :Cheeky:Ok. But my point would be that in cases like this the translators are clearly mis-interpreting the author, and the reason for that is that because of their christian belief they don't like what he seems to be saying.

So the translation based upon a different textual variant has become idiomatic, and therefor it's OK for Christians to translate it incorrectly. What a shame.

spin

You haven't trained me well enough, ie it's your fault.

Are they misinterpreting the intentions of the writer?

I indicated that even though the English might use "[spirit or ghost] descended upon", it functionally means "descended into". That's not incorrect translation, but idiomatic.