Changes to the Word of God seen in other Bible Versions

[Albion]

Have you had a chance to look at the updated RSV from Schuyler Press?

No, but it sounds like something to be checked into.

 

[MarkRohfrietsch]

No, but it sounds like something to be checked into.

Schuyler Quentel RSV - evangelicalbible.com

 

[The Liturgist]

Finally, the KJV is just a translation; it is not the pure Word of God.

Indeed, only our Lord, God and Savior is the pure Word (John 1:1). However, Albion is not by any means a KJV-onlyist, but rather a traditional Anglican, and the KJV, better known as the Authorized Version, has been since its completion the traditional Anglican Bible, used for the lessons in the church and most scripture except for, among other things, the Psalter and the Lord’s Prayer; the traditional Psalter is specifically the Coverdale Psalter, which has a reputation for being easier to chant than the KJV Book of Psalms (although everyone I know loves Psalm 23 as rendered in the KJV; despite being a diehard Septuagint enthusiast when it comes to the Old Testament, one of the places where I prefer the KJV is Psalms 23.

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and other traditional Orthodox parishes also greatly appreciate the KJV; it is the preferred New Testament translation in ROCOR. In another bit of Anglican parallelism, ROCOR uses the Jordanville Psalter, named for the Holy Trinity Monastery and Seminary in Jordanville, New York, which is the Coverdale Psalter corrected against the Septuagint text, so as to follow Septuagint content (for example, in Sing a New Song Unto the Lord, Psalm 95 in the LXX and 96 in the KJV and other Masoretic/Hebraic translations, verse 5 reads “the gods of the gentiles are demons” as opposed to “the gods of the gentiles are idols”, which I think is doctrinally much more relevant; also Psalm 151 is included) and Septuagint versification (which facilitates dividing the Psalter into 60 nearly evenly sized Stases, three of which comprise a Kathisma; the Coverdale Psalter is also divided into 60 units, but the Orthodox liturgy reads the Psalms on a weekly schedule, twice weekly in Lent, as part of Matins, while Anglicanism reads them monthly and divides them between Morning Prayer or Choral Mattins, and Evening Prayer, or Choral Evensong).

The Coptic Orthodox Church also tends to use the KJV in its English language service books, for example, the four New Testament lessons from the Divine Liturgy, the Old Testament lessons at Evening, Midnight and Morning Psalmody (which correspond to Vespers, Vigils and Matins), and the Agpeya, or Hours, another component of the Coptic divine office, which is invariant outside of Holy Week, which consists of Prime, Terce, Sext, Noone, the Eleventh Hour, the Twelfth Hour, and the Prayer of the Veil, which is mainly used by clergy and monks before going to sleep.

Each of these has a fixed Psalter lesson, and over the course of the day, most of the Psalter is read in the Agpeya; a deacon, subdeacon, reader, or even myself on one occasion, is tasked with assigning two or three psalms from each hour to each member of the congregation. (monks tend to read and eventually memorize the Psalms, and the recitation of the Psalms is a practice similiar to the Eastern Orthodox practice of Hesychasm, which uses the Jesus Prayer instead, something that has become popular in Coptic monasteries and which was I believe popularized by Fr. Lazarus el Antony, an Australian convert, who joined a Serbian Orthodox monastery where he would have learned the prayer, and later requested and received permission from Pope Shenouda, memory eternal, to come to Egypt; since that time he has been an extremely successful monk, who lives as an Anchorite, a hermit, in a cave near the Cave of St. Anthony, where he celebrates the Divine Liturgy at midnight, usually with other monks or pilgrims from St. Anthony’s Monastery, which is located in the valley below.

The complex Coptic Divine Office also has a third part, the Morning and Evening Raising of Incense, which precedes the Divine Liturgy and the Psalmody respectively, and which appears to be a remnant of a lost “Cathedral Office” similiar to the Cathedral Typikon in the Byzantine Rite, once used at the Hagia Sophia and other major cathedrals in Thessalonica, Athens and elsewhere, until it was supplanted by the monastic Sabaite-Studite Typikon, which already dominated parishes, and is still used by the Russian, Georgian, Ukrainian and Serbian Orthodox churches, and I think the Bulgarians also use it, and by the monasteries on Mount Athos. The Russian Old Rite Orthodox, whether in communion with the Moscow Patriarch (edinovertsy) or another Patriarchate (such as Romania in the case of the Lipovans), or members of one of the Old Rite hierachies such as the Belakritsniya Hierarchy, or priest-less, like the Pomorsky, many of whom live in Woodburn, Oregon, use an older recension of the Sabaite Typikon, while that of the rest of Russian Orthodoxy was updated in 1660 by Patriarch Nikon, which caused a schism, and the closest thing Orthodoxy ever had to a Protestant reformation, only, the irony was, the schism was reactionary, to a perceived degradation in liturgical ritual, which caused a proliferation of apocalyptic sects; this is doubtless because the Russians were satisfied with their liturgy, which was in a language they could understand without too much difficulty, Church Slavonic, and had communion in both kinds (and indeed, both the Old Rite and current versions retain these features).

 

[The Liturgist]

Schuyler Quentel RSV - evangelicalbible.com

That looks awesome. For the most part, I really like the RSV. The only contemporary language Bible I find textually elegant is the old NIV (the new one, with its gender neutral language and PCness, is annoying, although not as annoying as the over the top gender neutrality in the modified Open Bible translation used by Hal Taussig in his New New Testament, where, for example, “The Son of Man” is rendered as “The Child of Humanity”, which makes his thesis, that the apocryphal Gospels and other books he has collected can coexist with the original New Testament, harder to evaluate, because the approach used reflects neither the original text of the canonical gospels, or the apocrypha (which is largely, but not exclusively, Gnostic material from Nag Hammadi).

 

[Athanasius377]

Have you had a chance to look at the updated RSV from Schuyler Press?
My Pastor just got a copy, and I am very impressed with not only the retention of the traditional language, but also in the up-to-date scholarship. It contains the Apocrypha at the back of the book. Schuyler Quentel RSV - evangelicalbible.com

I have a copy. I also have a Schuyler ESV that I use all the time and the RSV is the same outstanding quality. There are however a couple of typos in the text. Comapny instead of Company in Exodus is an example. So the text is not perfect but who knows when they are going to print another edition?

 

[GreekOrthodox]

I have a copy. I also have a Schuyler ESV that I use all the time and the RSV is the same outstanding quality. There are however a couple of typos in the text. Comapny instead of Company in Exodus is an example. So the text is not perfect but who knows when they are going to print another edition?

Still better than one of our service books which has one ending of the Lord's prayer, "deliver us for evil"

Sigh...

 

[Athanasius377]

Still better than one of our service books which has one ending of the Lord's prayer, "deliver us for evil"

Sigh...

Yikes!