Hello all. Recently I have become interested in studying different versions of the Bible. My Family and I normally have read the King James Version, and occasionally we have looked at the NIV, but I would like to extend my studies to learn the most about God's Word as possible.
So I would like to ask: what version of the Bible do you prefer and why? Which do you believe is the version that is most true to Christ's vision? Recently my young Niece has expressed interest in studying the Bible in more depth - which version would you recommend that is easy for a young girl (aged 9) to comprehend but is also as accurate as possible?
Thank you, XOXO God Bless.
-Chris
I think that the very nature of translation as a medium means that we can't have anything perfect. There is an Italian adage that goes, "Traduttore, traditore" meaning "The translator is a traitor". It means that the very act of translating will in some way betray the source. Even with this Italian saying a translation of it misses the nuance of wordplay that is in the original Italian. Word play, nuance, idiomatic expression, etc are all elements that inevitably are lost in translation.
So that means it is very important that we get over the idea that we can have a perfect translation. Translations can't be perfect, almost by definition.
That said, I think there are good translations and bad translations, and we can debate the merits of any given translation; but often it might be as nuanced of a debate as one translation does one thing really well, but another translation does something else even better; thus which is the better of the two translations?
With all that said, over the course of my life I've used the KJV, the NIV, the NKJV, the NASB, the NRSV, and the ESV, among others.
99% of the time when I quote Scripture on here I am using the ESV, though in the past I've also used the NRSV quite a bit. And I believe that presently both the ESV and NRSV represent perhaps the two main translations used by both Catholic and Protestant English-speaking Christians today. English-speaking Orthodox Christians, I believe, tend to use a modified form of the NKJV (IIRC, the NKJV New Testament, with a fresh translation of the Septuagint for the Old Testament).
It is also helpful to know the complexity of our source material. Very often one can read about there being two basic text-types, or manuscript families, the Byzantine and Alexandrian; where the Byzantine represents the majority of our manuscripts but also they tend to date later; and the Alexandria represents a minority of our manuscripts but they also tend to date earlier. This is basically true, but also a massive over-simplification. Because it's actually way more complicated than that, as there are Byzantine manuscripts with Alexandrian readings and vice versa. Not only that, but not all manuscripts fit into one or either category, there are other text-types, other families, such as the Caesarean text-type and the Western text-type.
Because of this, translators work from critical editions of the New Testament. A critical edition is a composite text drawn from a number of manuscripts. Examples of such critical editions include the five editions of Erasmus' Greek New Testament, the critical editions of Theodore Bezae and Stephanus (these being the source texts which the 1611 translators of the KJV used). Over the centuries since we also have the Westcott-Hort, though it isn't widely used, the Nestle-Aland, and others.
And thus far we are only talking the New Testament. The issue of the Old Testament is also complicated, but in other ways. Namely whether or not the later Masoretic Text of the middle ages should be used and regarded as more reliable than the older Septuagint and Dead Sea Scroll textual tradition.
I hope this doesn't come across as overwhelming. But it is helpful information to know moving forward. At the end of the day it may depend entirely on what kind of Bible study one is doing, and how in depth one wants to go. For daily devotionals, I think it suffices only to have a decent translation--e.g. the ESV, NRSV, or any mainstream, well respected translation. The more indepth and deeper the study, the more things do start to get complex, and is why various study aids and scholarly tools can become increasingly more important.
-CryptoLutheran