Finally someone has succeeded in making the Good News Bible look conservative.
I teach parts of the Bible in a college course. I would like to use the King James Version, since it is by far the most familiar to most people in the English world and was used by most of our great writers. But I settled for the Revised Standard Version (RSV) as the best for students who are put off by the antique language. It's accurate and it has most of the dignity of the KJV.
I usually have a few Jewish students in the class who know the Hebrew well, and they are not happy with some of the more modern versions, which depart widely from the original Hebrew. They seem happy with the RSV, which was produced by a committee of Protestant and Catholic scholars who were not fortunately committed to the watered-down, least common denominator version of ecumenism.
Most of the translations published since the RSV are less, not more accurate, because the agenda is usually feminist and political. "Man" is out. "He" is out. "Father" is out. And so forth.
Yes, Peter means "rock" in both Greek and Latin. His name was Simon, and Jesus changed it to Peter because he said he was the Rock on which he would build his Church. But the thing to do is to tell people that, in a note or a sermon, not change his name to Rocky.
Changing of names goes back to Genesis and Exodus, where God changes Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Jacob to Israel, and so forth, to indicated that they were being brought into His covenant and beginning a new life of faithfulness under a new name.
Cicero, out of curiosity, what do you think of the NIV translation? That's what my in-laws gave me when I accepted Jesus four years ago, and it's what I've used since, though my church uses the New American Standard.
Oh...I don't mean the gender-neutral NIV, I mean the slightly older one where God was still "He". :)
}:-)4