What is the difference in these four? And also is there an Old testament? If so what do you recommend (assuming theres different versions of it).
Those provided are Bible translations, and are both Old and New Testament.
Differences in translation is a fairly large conversation on its own. Here's just one reason (I apologize, as it's long and wordy):
What Christians call the Old Testament was originally written primarily in Hebrew, a couple of the most recent Old Testament texts such as Daniel and Esther were written in Aramaic as Aramaic became the primary language of the Jewish people after the Babylonian Captivity (Aramaic was the common language of the Neo-Assyrian, Babylonian, and later Persian Empires). After the conquests of Alexander the Great Greek culture and language spread east and south, to Egypt, Palestine, and as far as modern Afghanistan. Under Greek rule a translation of Jewish Scripture was translated into Greek, known as the Septuagint or the LXX (both mean "Seventy").
Hellenistic Jews and the early Christians used the Septuagint as a readily available translation of Scripture, quotes in the New Testament are usually word-for-word from the Septuagint. Also, really old Hebrew manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls often agree with the Septuagint.
In the middle ages a group of Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes put forward a standardized Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible (known as the Tanakh), this is known as the Masoretic Text. The Masoretic Text differs in some ways to both the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls, but agrees with other earlier Hebrew manuscript traditions. Christians traditionally used the Septuagint in the East, and Western Christians used the Vulgate, a Latin translation made by St. Jerome which included Hebrew manuscripts he was familiar with at the time which also largely agree with the Septuagint. Jews, however, followed the Masoretic Text in the late middle ages.
In the 16th century when the Protestant Reformation happened Reformation leaders such as Martin Luther believed in the importance of translating the Bible into the languages of the peasantry, so Luther translated the Bible in German, English translators later also made translations, including William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale. These early Protestant vernacular Bibles used number of sources, and translators used the best of their knowledge to choose the best variant readings when their sources differed, these sources included:
For the Old Testament: The Masoretic Text with supplements from the Septuagint and the Vulgate.
For the New Testament: The critical Greek editions made by Erasmus of Rotterdam.
in the early 17th century there existed several English Bibles in Great Britain, in order to produce a single, standardized, authoritative translation for use in the Church of England King James I summoned many of the foremost scholars of the time to produce a standardized translation for the Church of England. As sources they used what I mentioned above, plus they relied heavily on earlier English translations such as Tyndale and Coverdale, and they used other Greek editions by Theodore Beza and Robert Estienne (also known as Robertus Stephanus). The translation they made was known then as the Authorized Version, but is known to us today as the King James Version (named after King James I of England).
In the years since then we have uncovered many more manuscripts of the New Testament that are much older than what Erasmus had to work with (some dating to the 2nd century), and there exist a diverse number of variant readings among manuscripts. We also discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s, making things even better for us in regard to the Old Testament.
When it comes to manuscripts of the New Testament there are, generally speaking, what we call "text types", broad families of manuscripts that are more closely related than to others. The two biggest are the Byzantine text type and the Alexandrian text type. Modern scholars have used both of these families of texts (and not exclusively necessarily) to produce new critical editions like that of Erasmus, Beza, and Stephanus. Modern translations then rely on these critical editions to make their translations.
So differences in translation can come about because of these differences in source material. Different translations rely on different source texts in an attempt to figure out what the best readings are, in order to produce as faithful a translation possible.
It's important, also, to keep in mind that when we talk about all these variant readings in manuscripts and source texts, we aren't talking wildly different. We're often talking about inconsequential things, a slightly different word order but saying the same thing, occasionally some manuscripts contain a word that others don't. Very rarely do these variant readings amount to anything significant in the text's meaning, here's an example:
The Textus Receptus (Latin for Received Text) is a critical edition of the Greek New Testament that takes the readings from Erasmus, Beza, and Stephanus used in the King James Version. Here is the Textus Receptus reading of Ephesians 5:22
"Αἱ γυναῖκες τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὑποτάσσεσθε, ὡς τῷ κυρίῳ"
Here is a more modern critical edition of the Greek text, the GNT Morph
"αἱ γυναῖκες τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὡς τῷ κυρίῳ"
The difference is a single word ὑποτάσσεσθε (pronounced hupotassesthe, a form of ὑποτάσσω (hupotasso) meaning "to submit".
In the GNT Morph the sentence, if translated literally, would read:
"The wives/women [your] own the husbands/men as the lord"
Or translated more understandably, "Wives, your own husbands as to the Lord."
This doesn't make a lot of sense on its own, but that's because there's no verb to make the sentence make sense; that's because in Greek it is possible to borrow a verb from a preceding statement, so in Ephesians 5:21 it says "submit to one another" the verb is ὑποτασσόμενοι, "submit to". So in fact the translation should be:
"Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord."
This is, also, precisely what the Textus Receptus says, including the verb for "submit"
"Αἱ γυναῖκες τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὑποτάσσεσθε, ὡς τῷ κυρίῳ"
"The wives/women [your] own the husbands/men submit to, as the lord"
or, "Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord."
So in translation the meaning is the same, even though there are differences in the source text.
-CryptoLutheran
