Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. Isn't this going to put a crimp in the Creationists' "the Bible is the Word of God and Must Be Taken Literally" argument? ;)
This is a very fair and careful analysis of the various translations.... I was almost expecting a "KJV only" argument, but was pleasantly surprised.
Personally I use the English Standard Version (ESV) for study (a very recent and accurate translation). The New King James Version (NKJV) is also about the most beautiful of the modern tranlations, preserving (relieving one of my pet peeves) the tradition of capitalizing the pronouns for God, as He's definitely worth it!
Lord willing I'll start learning Koine Greek this summer....
Good article.
Was reared on the KJV and that's what my memory work was all in.
But I like the NIV and am currently reading THE MESSAGE by Peterson.
I like THE MESSAGE a LOT because it is so close to the vernacular of the original. It captures God as I've long felt Him to be.
I've long found Him to be very Holy, High and Lifted up
but not prissy.
NIV sux. KJV s'OK.
The English Standard Version does some gender neutralizing in the Old Testament, and I would be cautious in recommending it. My personal favoroite for a safe, readable Bible is the New King James.
the older i get the more i like the Large Print Version. :)
Good article.
IMHO, another important reason to question dynamic equivolency is to not lose spiritual implications of the Word or substituting soulish perspective for spiritual discernment.
When communicating spiritual aspects to a fellow brother who may be scarred in his soul by soulish things, one has to fish for different hooks so the brother's thinking slides back to being in line with God after confession and repentance.
Frequently, in our scarred thinking processes, our scarred soul, we cause ourselves to slide back out of fellowship with God because we have slid back into a thinking habit that doesn't place faith in Him, but was learned while we were independent from Him. This is why it is so important to confess known and unknown sins along with repentance in our thinking prior to studying the Word of God. When we return to Him by faith and seek to further study His Word, so our thinking is as He directs, and so He might further sanctify our spirit by His grace, we frequently seek Scripture to guide us accordingly as His Word.
If that Word has been altered, we might be led into actually a scarred thinking that we associate mentally with religion and emotionally with what we misperceived to have been His Word. This trend is typically the vice of legalists who have backslidden from God in a moral degeneracy.
IMHO, many places where I have been scarred and later been led by Him to further understand His meaning and been better developed by Him through faith in Him, have been where I had read the Scripture originally from a soulish perspective, had considered myself righteous in my own eyes (a scarred perspective) but later led to an apparant inconsistency in Scripture and my understanding of what would have seemed to have been consistent. In these situations, the explicit and literal interpretation of Scripture was very important, but not necessarily in a legalistic fashion. Rather, sometimes what is not said is as important as what is stated.
The Holy Spirit guiding us in discerning those differences is immensely important, and arguably the only method we have for spiritual eyesight.
***In general, I would tell any person, whatever be his age or social class or education level, to stick with a traditional type of translation – KJV or RSV or ASV or NKJV or ESV.***
I have really taken a liking to the ESV.