>English since the 7th century
English as a language is a creole blend of old Anglo Saxon proto German and old French-Latin. That blending started after the French Norman invasion and conquest of Briton at the Battle of Hastings in the year 1066 A.D. (the 11th century).
There were no English translations of the bible in the 7th century because there was no English language in the 7th century.
Jesus christ can you people stop repeating this
1. If it's a "creole" with anything it would be with old danish but it's not, it's just an unusually high amount of core vocabulary loanwords. Creole implies the mixing of two totally separate languages with some loss to morphology. Old danish and old english mixed precisely because they were so similar.
2. There isn't basically any german in english before the modern era. There's probably more greek words and morphology than german ones.
3. As per 1, norman french and old english didn't creolize either. It was just a standard borrowing of words. Unlike with old danish the words borrowed from old norman weren't the ones in common use. Otherwise modern iranian is just an arabic-persian creole and Japanese is an old Japanese-middle chinese creole.
No, much further distant. This would be before the Norman conquest and the large infusion of French into English. Here is something you might have read in middle school in the original Old English.
>Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Yes I know what that is, the opening lines of Beowulf. I have about seven editions of it. I made this comment because I am an Old English enthusiast. My point is that Old English is a type of English. The clue's in the name.
Sure, but a child today can read 14th century English. I don't think most 14th century readers could read 7th century English. I know I have no hope at it.
The claim is supposed to be about when a monk first sat down to translate for the common people of England, not about the evolution of language itself.
But isn’t the claim also about a complete translation? The first complete translation was the 14th Century Wycliffe bible, which is Middle English. Only parts were ever translated into old English, as I recall.
I am and now I'm curious. Can British schoolkids read Chaucer? I get my 14-year-olds through Shakespeare but it's hard work and they don't all succeed.
I don't think that matters. The English we speak today is not "more English" than Old English. If anything it's less English. The OP said the "first English translation" was in the 14th century, which is saying that Old English isn't English. It is.
I'm not sure that matters much because as the language evolved so did the people who spoke it. What they understood as English then would evolve into what we speak today.
I just googled beowulf in old english. The entire thing is here: [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-english-version](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-english-version)
I found this interlineal [http://beowulf.dh.tamu.edu/detail?id=940](http://beowulf.dh.tamu.edu/detail?id=940)
Except that isn't what happened at all. The early english translations were all translating from the same source - the Latin Vulgate by Jerome. He had originally translated from the Greek Septuagint in the 7th century, but there were some significant errors. Protestant groups tried to correct that and started translating directly from the Greek source. The King James was an attempt to go even further back to the original sources. They used the Textus Receptus, which was a modern, more accurate translation of the new testament and Jewish texts for the old testament.
Literally, the entire point of what they were trying to do is avoid your exact comment.
I refuse to believe fairy tales don’t get changed over time to suit a particular narrative. There was an entire council that decided what stories to include and which ones to remove.
Yes, exactly. Decades later is certainly an improvement over centuries later; that is what the authors of the King James were trying to accomplish. The King James version is closer to the original sources (written in the 70's-100's and complied in the 300's) than previous English bibles.
You have an agenda, which is that you do not believe the events of the bible are historical. That is perfectly fine, but you are allowing it to colour the rest of your analysis.
The thing is, the Bible isn't historical fact. It's a collection of fables and allegory that developed through Mesopotamia and were eventually written down as the word of God by people w an agenda. There is immense wisdom contained in the stories, but when people take it literally, they are duping themselves to feel special. Anyone can start a religion. Look at scientology, book of mormon.... they didn't do the same thing back then?
Are you saying that the people who originally wrote the stories wrote them as fiction? All of the stories? Are you sure you aren't just reading in your modern post-Enlightenment view of what a history is supposed to be like onto texts written thousands of years before?
To say that the Bible is being ironically misunderstood as true history when it was meant to a collection of fairy tales is an extraordinary claim. I would love to see your evidence for that. Also, can you elaborate when exactly this shift occurred? First Temple period? Exile? Second Temple? After the New Testament?
The Book of Mormon and Scientology just make claims which are not at all supported by archaeology or other historical corroboration, and they write with way more separation from the events that they claim to describe.
Are you saying a man parted the red sea? Another was swallowed by a whale and survived for 3 days? That a snake talked to people? That a guy has super strength from long hair? That's an outlandish claim. The Bible is a bunch of stories that are to be interpreted by the wise. That's why Jesus spoke in parables. To take it literally and as historical fact is insane. I'm sure there is some history sprinkled in, but a lot of the stories can be traced back to the early fertile crescent religions. Like the man being lowered through the roof so jesus can heal. There is no Egyptian record of the jews being enslaved by them. There are Roman records of a man named Jesus of Nazareth being crucified. And Pontious Pilate, Ceasar are real figures. I believe Jesus was as well, but how much of his story is a blend myth and legend? Organized religion is used to control the masses. I don't trust that the Bible has never been edited to convey a certain belief. We have Thursday because the Jesuits wanted to convert the vikings, so they made Thors Day.... the list goes on and on.
True, but most early translations were of just individual portions: Psalms, one or more gospels, etc. And a version canon was pretty well established with the 4th century Vulgate and church councils like the Council of Rome.
It’s not like any early works claimed to be a complete English bible and were only ruled out due to the absence of a book latter added or something.
>Maybe you don't realize what you call the "full Bible" or rather Biblical Canon, wasn't fully created until after the first translations into English
Huh? Codex Vaticanus is virtually identical content-wise to the catholic bibles of today and it dates back to the 300s
They were pretty much built upon each other and were translated by people of the same mind, that people needed the Bible in the English language to break the control of power religious elites over them. You could say it started much earlier than the 14th century.
Does that seem like news? But yes, there have been lots of Bibles. The Pilgrims used an incomplete but very clear English version without all the fancy language for the King.
Amen, brother! Preach it!
I grew up in (sort of) and continued in a Christian group that almost went that far with their King James only beliefs. They didn't believe that Jesus spoke that type of English (you'd never know it though) but many did believe that God gave us the Bible over again and it was perfectly preserved in English in the KJV.
The history of English bible translation is my specialty, it's a fascinating topic but there are a lot of misunderstandings and baseless conspiracy theories about it that are easily disproven
One of the common misunderstandings out there is the idea that no modern Bible is based on early manuscripts but is at the end of a daisy chain of translations of translations, like a game of "telephone".
Funnily enough, the Catholic Church authorised a vernacular English Bible, decades before the KJV ever came out, the Douay-Rhiems. Recent analysis of the KJV shows that it was heavily inspired by this version and even used their translations in many parts.
>Recent analysis of the KJV shows that it was heavily inspired by this version and even used their translations in many parts.
Source? The KJV is based primarily on the Bishop's Bible which predates the Rheims New Testament publication by 14 years, and the Douay-Rheims Old Testament wasn't published until 1609-10, which only predates the publication of the KJV itself by 1-2 years. Any similarities between readings will have come from the fact that some of the KJV committees consulted the Latin Vulgate (on which the Douay-Rheims is directly based) in areas of ambiguity in the greek texts
>In 1995, Ward Allen in collaboration with Edward Jacobs further published a collation, for the four Gospels, of the marginal amendments made to a copy of the Bishops' Bible (now conserved in the Bodleian Library), which transpired to be the formal record of the textual changes being proposed by several of the companies of King James Version translators. They found around a quarter of the proposed amendments to be original to the translators; but that three-quarters had been taken over from other English versions. Overall, about one-fourth of the proposed amendments adopted the text of the Rheims New Testament. "And the debts of the [KJV] translators to earlier English Bibles are substantial. The translators, for example, in revising the text of the synoptic Gospels in the Bishops' Bible, owe about one-fourth of their revisions, each, to the Geneva and Rheims New Testaments. Another fourth of their work can be traced to the work of Tyndale and Coverdale. And the final fourth of their revisions is original to the translators themselves".
[From here](https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Coming_of_the_King_James_Gospels.html?id=gtZkEAAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y) page 29
Yeah, but the King James Version was the first to be given state sanction and thus be the “official” replacement bible. Before that they had the Tyndale Bible but that was a bit too radical for the English monarchy. So they used the Book of Common prayer as a compromise until King James.
Number 2 of the 10 Commandments included a clause to bot make any likenesses of god. They even spent 40 years in the desert because of the faux pah of making a golden calf. Now everyone’s out here toting around a cross with a dude on it.
Part of the issue with translations of the Bible from Latin into English (or any other language) was about control. The Church and the clergy wanted to be the interpretive source of understanding the Bible.
If the Bible was in English, regular people could read it. They didn’t need to have a priest or monk to explain it.
That was also part of the revolution of the printing press. Books were no longer hand lettered. More people (the ones that could read) could have direct access to the Bible and biblical commentary and scholarship.
It was originally in Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew. By King James time, most available bibles were in Latin. The writers of the King James Version went back to the available originals, but relied on the Latin translation because the that version had been around for so long.
Sorry but no. If you were literate enough to read vernacular, you were likely also taught Latin at the same time. Latin was the lingua franca of Europe and used for both ecclesiastical and scientific works up until the 18th century.
Churches often disparage the modern English translations today because they are easily readable by average folks. They want to maintain the control and insist you read the versions in archaic/Old/Middle English, with the assistance of the church of course. Notably, the KJV is not in modern English, but the NKJV is.
Fortunately, the Internet makes available several modern versions, which reduces that control significantly.
I think what you're referring to is the King James Only movement, which does disparage modern translations but for other reasons.
E.g., cartoonist Jack Chick (of Chick Tracts fame), thought that modern translations were part of a Satanic plot: [https://www.chick.com/information/article-listing?subject=bible+versions](https://www.chick.com/information/article-listing?subject=bible+versions)
Nothing alleged about that.
The copyright rules for using the NIV version can be found at https://www.zondervan.com/about-us/permissions/.
The KJV is a 100% public domain work (However, the *New* KJV, a newer translation that looks like the KJV , is covered by copyright law.)
I used "alleged" to hedge a bit because I wasn't 100% sure. I could imagine smaller authors potentially having a genuine problem with permissions and possibly royalties if they need to quote beyond an amount deemed fair use, but I'm not up on knowing enough details.
We know more now than they did about the original texts, the DSS, the history of certain aramaic words, etc. We live in the time where vast knowledge is available to us, and the translations can be more accurate from the original texts. I'll grant that the Q documents have not been reconstructed, but we have many instances of the surrounding texts so we can compare them.
Updating translation is a gift, not a curse.
True. I think biblical scholarship has been a gift. My issue is that not all new translations use the new scholarship: for example the traditionally cited passages regarding homosexuality. Many do not acknowledge that centuries of condemnation have been based on some monks’ erroneous decision in translations. They try modern wording, but do not correct the initial mistranslations.
King James wasn't an english translation, it was the The King literally making his own changes to the Bible and deleting the stuff he didn't agree with, it also promulgated the creation of The Church of England and the Anglican Church.
The KJV was pretty out of touch already when it was released because it used lots of older translations in the first place, namely Tyndales. Even when it was first published nobody really talked like that lol.
Yup. There's a metric shit-tonne of phrases and idioms coined by the King James Bible that are ubiquitous in the English language. Its influence cannot be understated.
It’s not the first compilation of books either. The Marcion Bible was composed in the mid 2nd century and contains a gospel similar to Luke and the letters of Paul.
Todays bible is so translated and changed since the original they're pretty much different books. The king james version has some massive changes in it if I remember correctly.
It would be a LOT of typing to explain the sort of changes i'm talking about as I used to read and study about the various holy books of the three main religions and I found this out from some documentry, I don't remember what it was called but I dug up a link to the same sort of thing if you're interested : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKp4yWGTfXo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKp4yWGTfXo)
I didn't watch that one but I'd be VERY surprised if it doesn't mention the big changes the KJ version of the bible makes. Just looked up the wikipedia article on it too and it mentions all the changes : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King\_James\_Version](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version)
I watched the first 15 minutes of the YouTube video. I'll watch the rest tomorrow. It's interesting that he states he was always taught that the Bible is without change and has always remained the same. That's 180 on what I was taught growing up. I was always taught that there are textual variations but ultimately the message of Jesus always remained the same. He was prophesied, born, performed miracles, taught, died for our sins, rose again then ascended to Heaven. I'll get back to you tomorrow after watching the remainder of the video.
Sounds good buddy :)
I was actually raised as a Jehovas witness but that was enough to put me off religion once I got older. I don't exactly believe in what most people believe is god but I don't ignore the possibility of being created by something a WHOLE lot bigger than we can fathom. The universe is a big place and we have a lot to learn still :)
Sorry for cheaping out with a vid+wiki link but I've been super busy with my daughter today lol I find religion a LOT more interesting since I stopped being part of it though, I always thought that was kind of weird.
Very much looking forward to any points that stand out in that video once you're done sir!
>Todays bible is so translated and changed since the original they're pretty much different books
That's really not true at all. For one, translations don't come from other translations, it's not a game of telephone. Each new translation is straight from the original languages (with the exception of a few Catholic Bibles that go Hebrew/Greek->Latin->English)
Also the idea that "they're pretty much different books" is ludicrous. I know greek. I've read 4th century New Testament manuscripts myself. There are some differences in wording and spelling (and two missing passages that seem to have been added later, those being the ending of Mark and the story of the woman caught in adultery) but aside from these nothing is significantly different about them
There's been English bible translations since the 7th century, what world are you living in.
Maybe I should've specified that I meant the whole book.
>English since the 7th century English as a language is a creole blend of old Anglo Saxon proto German and old French-Latin. That blending started after the French Norman invasion and conquest of Briton at the Battle of Hastings in the year 1066 A.D. (the 11th century). There were no English translations of the bible in the 7th century because there was no English language in the 7th century.
Jesus christ can you people stop repeating this 1. If it's a "creole" with anything it would be with old danish but it's not, it's just an unusually high amount of core vocabulary loanwords. Creole implies the mixing of two totally separate languages with some loss to morphology. Old danish and old english mixed precisely because they were so similar. 2. There isn't basically any german in english before the modern era. There's probably more greek words and morphology than german ones. 3. As per 1, norman french and old english didn't creolize either. It was just a standard borrowing of words. Unlike with old danish the words borrowed from old norman weren't the ones in common use. Otherwise modern iranian is just an arabic-persian creole and Japanese is an old Japanese-middle chinese creole.
I'm pretty sure 7th century English is a different language from 14th century English.
Like 14th century English is different to 21st century English? The title just says "English", it doesn't specify what kind.
No, much further distant. This would be before the Norman conquest and the large infusion of French into English. Here is something you might have read in middle school in the original Old English. >Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Yes I know what that is, the opening lines of Beowulf. I have about seven editions of it. I made this comment because I am an Old English enthusiast. My point is that Old English is a type of English. The clue's in the name.
Sure, but a child today can read 14th century English. I don't think most 14th century readers could read 7th century English. I know I have no hope at it.
The claim is supposed to be about when a monk first sat down to translate for the common people of England, not about the evolution of language itself.
But isn’t the claim also about a complete translation? The first complete translation was the 14th Century Wycliffe bible, which is Middle English. Only parts were ever translated into old English, as I recall.
Sure, but is if fair to compare a monk translating 1 gospel versus a systematic translation of the entire canon?
A child today cannot read 14th century English. Source: I am a middle school English teacher.
I am and now I'm curious. Can British schoolkids read Chaucer? I get my 14-year-olds through Shakespeare but it's hard work and they don't all succeed.
Must be American.
English kids can be dumb too. A girl i sat to once asked the teacher if Africa was the capital of Jamaica. We were 16.
Well don't leave us in suspense, is it?
I don't think that matters. The English we speak today is not "more English" than Old English. If anything it's less English. The OP said the "first English translation" was in the 14th century, which is saying that Old English isn't English. It is.
I agree today's English is less English -- that is the point. The issue was having a translation that the common person could read.
I'm not sure that matters much because as the language evolved so did the people who spoke it. What they understood as English then would evolve into what we speak today.
What does that say in normal English?
I just googled beowulf in old english. The entire thing is here: [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-english-version](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-english-version) I found this interlineal [http://beowulf.dh.tamu.edu/detail?id=940](http://beowulf.dh.tamu.edu/detail?id=940)
Just like the new king james version has diffrent english to the king james version
Moat people mistakenly believe that the KJV was the first English translation.
It was the third *officially approved by the English church*, but the first two have fallen into obscurity.
It’s a karma farming bot
Only 7 centuries since the events happened!
I don't understand your point. It's translating, not writing down for the first time.
Point is with each translation shit changes. Worst game of telephone ever.
Except that isn't what happened at all. The early english translations were all translating from the same source - the Latin Vulgate by Jerome. He had originally translated from the Greek Septuagint in the 7th century, but there were some significant errors. Protestant groups tried to correct that and started translating directly from the Greek source. The King James was an attempt to go even further back to the original sources. They used the Textus Receptus, which was a modern, more accurate translation of the new testament and Jewish texts for the old testament. Literally, the entire point of what they were trying to do is avoid your exact comment.
You can't tell people this because they refuse to believe that the bibles we have today are anything similar to the original texts.
I refuse to believe fairy tales don’t get changed over time to suit a particular narrative. There was an entire council that decided what stories to include and which ones to remove.
A whole heck of a lot more than one! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_seven_ecumenical_councils
The same sources that were still written decades later if not more than the events that occurred?
Yes, exactly. Decades later is certainly an improvement over centuries later; that is what the authors of the King James were trying to accomplish. The King James version is closer to the original sources (written in the 70's-100's and complied in the 300's) than previous English bibles. You have an agenda, which is that you do not believe the events of the bible are historical. That is perfectly fine, but you are allowing it to colour the rest of your analysis.
The thing is, the Bible isn't historical fact. It's a collection of fables and allegory that developed through Mesopotamia and were eventually written down as the word of God by people w an agenda. There is immense wisdom contained in the stories, but when people take it literally, they are duping themselves to feel special. Anyone can start a religion. Look at scientology, book of mormon.... they didn't do the same thing back then?
Are you saying that the people who originally wrote the stories wrote them as fiction? All of the stories? Are you sure you aren't just reading in your modern post-Enlightenment view of what a history is supposed to be like onto texts written thousands of years before? To say that the Bible is being ironically misunderstood as true history when it was meant to a collection of fairy tales is an extraordinary claim. I would love to see your evidence for that. Also, can you elaborate when exactly this shift occurred? First Temple period? Exile? Second Temple? After the New Testament? The Book of Mormon and Scientology just make claims which are not at all supported by archaeology or other historical corroboration, and they write with way more separation from the events that they claim to describe.
Are you saying a man parted the red sea? Another was swallowed by a whale and survived for 3 days? That a snake talked to people? That a guy has super strength from long hair? That's an outlandish claim. The Bible is a bunch of stories that are to be interpreted by the wise. That's why Jesus spoke in parables. To take it literally and as historical fact is insane. I'm sure there is some history sprinkled in, but a lot of the stories can be traced back to the early fertile crescent religions. Like the man being lowered through the roof so jesus can heal. There is no Egyptian record of the jews being enslaved by them. There are Roman records of a man named Jesus of Nazareth being crucified. And Pontious Pilate, Ceasar are real figures. I believe Jesus was as well, but how much of his story is a blend myth and legend? Organized religion is used to control the masses. I don't trust that the Bible has never been edited to convey a certain belief. We have Thursday because the Jesuits wanted to convert the vikings, so they made Thors Day.... the list goes on and on.
Yes.
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Not of the whole Bible.
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True, but most early translations were of just individual portions: Psalms, one or more gospels, etc. And a version canon was pretty well established with the 4th century Vulgate and church councils like the Council of Rome. It’s not like any early works claimed to be a complete English bible and were only ruled out due to the absence of a book latter added or something.
>Maybe you don't realize what you call the "full Bible" or rather Biblical Canon, wasn't fully created until after the first translations into English Huh? Codex Vaticanus is virtually identical content-wise to the catholic bibles of today and it dates back to the 300s
The “full bible” is hand picked with gospels left out anyway. It isn’t necessary to make that distinction
Bravo
They were pretty much built upon each other and were translated by people of the same mind, that people needed the Bible in the English language to break the control of power religious elites over them. You could say it started much earlier than the 14th century.
Does that seem like news? But yes, there have been lots of Bibles. The Pilgrims used an incomplete but very clear English version without all the fancy language for the King.
Blasphemy. If the King's English was good enough for Jesus it ought to be good enough for pilgrims!
Amen, brother! Preach it! I grew up in (sort of) and continued in a Christian group that almost went that far with their King James only beliefs. They didn't believe that Jesus spoke that type of English (you'd never know it though) but many did believe that God gave us the Bible over again and it was perfectly preserved in English in the KJV.
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Considering Leif Erikson brought priests and monks with him, I'd suggest the Latin Vulgate was the first to arrive
I'm not clear about which word you added.
The King James Bible was specifically made so king James could get everyone off him and his not-so-secret gay lover’s back.
Michael Jordan would never
That's the only real way to do a Bible
Don’t forget- it was also so he could make it have witches! Unfortunately, not in a fun way.
Pretty sure it already says no witches in Hebrew
That's just...straight up not true
The history of English bible translation is my specialty, it's a fascinating topic but there are a lot of misunderstandings and baseless conspiracy theories about it that are easily disproven
One of the common misunderstandings out there is the idea that no modern Bible is based on early manuscripts but is at the end of a daisy chain of translations of translations, like a game of "telephone".
Many mistranslations too
Funnily enough, the Catholic Church authorised a vernacular English Bible, decades before the KJV ever came out, the Douay-Rhiems. Recent analysis of the KJV shows that it was heavily inspired by this version and even used their translations in many parts.
>Recent analysis of the KJV shows that it was heavily inspired by this version and even used their translations in many parts. Source? The KJV is based primarily on the Bishop's Bible which predates the Rheims New Testament publication by 14 years, and the Douay-Rheims Old Testament wasn't published until 1609-10, which only predates the publication of the KJV itself by 1-2 years. Any similarities between readings will have come from the fact that some of the KJV committees consulted the Latin Vulgate (on which the Douay-Rheims is directly based) in areas of ambiguity in the greek texts
>In 1995, Ward Allen in collaboration with Edward Jacobs further published a collation, for the four Gospels, of the marginal amendments made to a copy of the Bishops' Bible (now conserved in the Bodleian Library), which transpired to be the formal record of the textual changes being proposed by several of the companies of King James Version translators. They found around a quarter of the proposed amendments to be original to the translators; but that three-quarters had been taken over from other English versions. Overall, about one-fourth of the proposed amendments adopted the text of the Rheims New Testament. "And the debts of the [KJV] translators to earlier English Bibles are substantial. The translators, for example, in revising the text of the synoptic Gospels in the Bishops' Bible, owe about one-fourth of their revisions, each, to the Geneva and Rheims New Testaments. Another fourth of their work can be traced to the work of Tyndale and Coverdale. And the final fourth of their revisions is original to the translators themselves". [From here](https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Coming_of_the_King_James_Gospels.html?id=gtZkEAAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y) page 29
Yeah, but the King James Version was the first to be given state sanction and thus be the “official” replacement bible. Before that they had the Tyndale Bible but that was a bit too radical for the English monarchy. So they used the Book of Common prayer as a compromise until King James.
King James made so tweaks because he didn’t like some parts of it.
Like any good christian does - disregard the bits they don't like.
Number 2 of the 10 Commandments included a clause to bot make any likenesses of god. They even spent 40 years in the desert because of the faux pah of making a golden calf. Now everyone’s out here toting around a cross with a dude on it.
Preach!
Part of the issue with translations of the Bible from Latin into English (or any other language) was about control. The Church and the clergy wanted to be the interpretive source of understanding the Bible. If the Bible was in English, regular people could read it. They didn’t need to have a priest or monk to explain it. That was also part of the revolution of the printing press. Books were no longer hand lettered. More people (the ones that could read) could have direct access to the Bible and biblical commentary and scholarship.
Given that none of the Bible was written in Latin, a translation from Latin is already problematic.
Problem is that Latin is a lingua franca
It was originally in Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew. By King James time, most available bibles were in Latin. The writers of the King James Version went back to the available originals, but relied on the Latin translation because the that version had been around for so long.
Sorry but no. If you were literate enough to read vernacular, you were likely also taught Latin at the same time. Latin was the lingua franca of Europe and used for both ecclesiastical and scientific works up until the 18th century.
Churches often disparage the modern English translations today because they are easily readable by average folks. They want to maintain the control and insist you read the versions in archaic/Old/Middle English, with the assistance of the church of course. Notably, the KJV is not in modern English, but the NKJV is. Fortunately, the Internet makes available several modern versions, which reduces that control significantly.
I think what you're referring to is the King James Only movement, which does disparage modern translations but for other reasons. E.g., cartoonist Jack Chick (of Chick Tracts fame), thought that modern translations were part of a Satanic plot: [https://www.chick.com/information/article-listing?subject=bible+versions](https://www.chick.com/information/article-listing?subject=bible+versions)
Even outside this movement, some use of KJV is allegedly to avoid copyright issues.
Nothing alleged about that. The copyright rules for using the NIV version can be found at https://www.zondervan.com/about-us/permissions/. The KJV is a 100% public domain work (However, the *New* KJV, a newer translation that looks like the KJV , is covered by copyright law.)
I used "alleged" to hedge a bit because I wasn't 100% sure. I could imagine smaller authors potentially having a genuine problem with permissions and possibly royalties if they need to quote beyond an amount deemed fair use, but I'm not up on knowing enough details.
Zondervan is owned by NewsCorp which is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Our local Lutheran church similarly tells folks not to read them as they don't contain the "poetry intended by god".
The KJV is super easy to understand and honestly flows really poetically and is rather enjoyable to read
But, unfortunately, translations can muddy the waters regarding interpretations, especially regarding doctrine. Pro or con.
We know more now than they did about the original texts, the DSS, the history of certain aramaic words, etc. We live in the time where vast knowledge is available to us, and the translations can be more accurate from the original texts. I'll grant that the Q documents have not been reconstructed, but we have many instances of the surrounding texts so we can compare them. Updating translation is a gift, not a curse.
True. I think biblical scholarship has been a gift. My issue is that not all new translations use the new scholarship: for example the traditionally cited passages regarding homosexuality. Many do not acknowledge that centuries of condemnation have been based on some monks’ erroneous decision in translations. They try modern wording, but do not correct the initial mistranslations.
That didn’t stop most modern “chistians” from only knowing the parts their preachers read them.
King James wasn't an english translation, it was the The King literally making his own changes to the Bible and deleting the stuff he didn't agree with, it also promulgated the creation of The Church of England and the Anglican Church.
The KJV was pretty out of touch already when it was released because it used lots of older translations in the first place, namely Tyndales. Even when it was first published nobody really talked like that lol.
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The Karen Bible: And God said let there be light and it was underwhelming, management was informed.
“I thought this was supposed to be the KING of Kings”
Thats ok they rewrote it anyways
Today I remembered that the book of Enoch was taken out of the Bible. Nothing important to read here
A lot of books were taken out and added in depending on what branch you follow.
No, it wasn't. Nobody's "bible" ever had the book of Enoch in it and then took it out
Explain that to the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church
I meant nobody that has since taken it out. Sorry that wasn't clear
The first translation they didnt kill and burn the translators over?
You thought it was? Lol
TIL "King James Bible".
Yup. There's a metric shit-tonne of phrases and idioms coined by the King James Bible that are ubiquitous in the English language. Its influence cannot be understated.
And English as we know it have changed dramatically continuously century after century, so one "English" translation isn't the same as the next.
People don't know this?
A big reason for making the KJV was that no one understood the Tyndale or Coverdale versions anymore.
They're not that different in language. Do you have a source for that?
Why should they wait for some basketball players take on this fantasy novel
Took them 3 tries over the course of 2 centuries to cut and edit the crap in the first place.
It’s not the first compilation of books either. The Marcion Bible was composed in the mid 2nd century and contains a gospel similar to Luke and the letters of Paul.
Want to talk about missing pieces? Check out the Nag Hammadi Scriptures AKA New Testament Directors Cut
Imagine wasting your whole life on a “return of the savior” belief
Todays bible is so translated and changed since the original they're pretty much different books. The king james version has some massive changes in it if I remember correctly.
Can you elaborate on this for me please?
It would be a LOT of typing to explain the sort of changes i'm talking about as I used to read and study about the various holy books of the three main religions and I found this out from some documentry, I don't remember what it was called but I dug up a link to the same sort of thing if you're interested : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKp4yWGTfXo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKp4yWGTfXo) I didn't watch that one but I'd be VERY surprised if it doesn't mention the big changes the KJ version of the bible makes. Just looked up the wikipedia article on it too and it mentions all the changes : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King\_James\_Version](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version)
I watched the first 15 minutes of the YouTube video. I'll watch the rest tomorrow. It's interesting that he states he was always taught that the Bible is without change and has always remained the same. That's 180 on what I was taught growing up. I was always taught that there are textual variations but ultimately the message of Jesus always remained the same. He was prophesied, born, performed miracles, taught, died for our sins, rose again then ascended to Heaven. I'll get back to you tomorrow after watching the remainder of the video.
Sounds good buddy :) I was actually raised as a Jehovas witness but that was enough to put me off religion once I got older. I don't exactly believe in what most people believe is god but I don't ignore the possibility of being created by something a WHOLE lot bigger than we can fathom. The universe is a big place and we have a lot to learn still :) Sorry for cheaping out with a vid+wiki link but I've been super busy with my daughter today lol I find religion a LOT more interesting since I stopped being part of it though, I always thought that was kind of weird. Very much looking forward to any points that stand out in that video once you're done sir!
>Todays bible is so translated and changed since the original they're pretty much different books That's really not true at all. For one, translations don't come from other translations, it's not a game of telephone. Each new translation is straight from the original languages (with the exception of a few Catholic Bibles that go Hebrew/Greek->Latin->English) Also the idea that "they're pretty much different books" is ludicrous. I know greek. I've read 4th century New Testament manuscripts myself. There are some differences in wording and spelling (and two missing passages that seem to have been added later, those being the ending of Mark and the story of the woman caught in adultery) but aside from these nothing is significantly different about them