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I use different versions of the bible as well, but I find that "squishy" translations may be transliterations that express the agenda of the translator rather than the truth of the bible.

The words of the bible were written in hugely diverse times and cultural settings. Spinning verses to convey a perceived relevance to unique modern contexts can easily mislead, rather than clarify, biblical teachings. The understanding of scripture must not be divorced from its original context.

Regards.

The words of the bible were written in hugely diverse times and cultural settings.

I heard a fundamentalist say much the same thing. He was preaching about how the devil takes a verse here and there, weaves them together and promotes false doctrine from them. He had me paying attention until he came back after the commercial break and used 5 different authors from a 1200 year time frame to make his next point.

Religion, or control of it, will be critical for the next step in the NWO. False prophets abound.

Have you ever read the book, Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus by David Bivin & Roy Blizzard? The authors did a direct translation of the New Testament from the Greek and Aramaic into Hebrew, and suddenly a lot of the confusing texts made perfect sense. They were Hebrew idioms. (English idioms are phrases like, "killing time", "hit the ceiling", "eat your heart out". Imagine if we read in the Bible we were supposed to eat our hearts!)

The popular wisdom has always been that the books were written in Greek & Aramaic, and that the historians of the time were confused when they stated the Gospels were originally written in Hebrew. The authors give a lot of extra-Biblical and Biblical evidence for the Gospels being written in Hebrew and later transliterated into Greek.

Some of the texts that appear to be obvious in Hebrew are:

I've not seen any critiques of the works of the Center for Judaic-Christian Studies and would be interested to know what researchers think of their work.