Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jarthur!ucivax!ucla-cs!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mls@sfsup.att.com (Mike Siemon) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Bible versions Message-ID: Date: 13 Jul 90 08:33:38 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 92 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , tp0x+@andrew.cmu.edu (Thomas Carl Price) writes: > If a "study" bible is one which contains "helpful" notes and a general plan > of reading and exegesis built in, I can't recommend it. (Not that you asked, > but you might be interested.) Any bible which contains such canned material > will constrain your or my reading of it more than we might think at first. > It will in fact not be an AV or a NKJV but a "team-of-scholars-who-laced-a- > bible-with-their-own-opiniions"V . > I have an interlinear KJ/RV wide-margin and love it. This is one of the more extreme versions I have ever seen of the view that the Word of God is somehow divorced from human language. The most extreme view would be for an American who didn't even know the Greek or Hebrew alphabets to buy original language texts and stare at the pages until God made known to him the meaning of these strange marks. What Mr. Price seems to intend is hardly less bizarre, and maybe even less logical. He would dispense with thousands of years of careful thought and study of the text, in favor of arbitrary "readings" of his own. (I suspect I'm exaggerating what he actually *does* -- but that's what it sounds like.) When you read an interlinear, if you *ever* look at the "pony" below the original texts, you are *relying* on the decisions of the translator. But these decisions all have a context -- the careful consideration of possible readings, and the selection among them by the translator. By dispensing with study notes, you are getting "pure opinion" and discarding any hope of knowing why the decisions were made. And even native speakers of the original languages (of whom there are none; modern Hebrew and Greek are of course related to the ancient tongues, but that too introduces problems) need the same context, at least unconsiously, when they "understand" an expression. Translation -- even interlinears -- is *irresponsible* unless it is a "team of scholars with opinions." And native speakers had better be as ready to listen to scholarship as English speakers should be if they wish to read the _Canterbury Tales_ and come out with any serious claim to understand what was written. Language is *inherently* a communal thing, and to ignore the relevant community is to MISUSE words. I'm more than willing (readers of some other threads may know :-)) to introduce questions relevant to language use that may not have been considered, or were not considered to my satsifaction, in traditional study. Mature use of study notes requires us to have some idea of the preconceptions of the scholars who wrote them, and be able to make allowances for these (perhaps most of all when we *agree* with them) -- but simply to toss out generations of serious and devoted biblical study smacks of both ignorance and arrogance. I hope I am just misconstruing what Mr. Price has said, but it sounds to me like he has a VERY dangerous "approach" to scripture, treating it more like the Delphic Oracle than the Word of God given to the people of God. -- Michael L. Siemon Inflict Thy promises with each m.siemon@ATT.COM Occasion of distress, ...!att!sfsup!mls That from our incoherence we standard disclaimer May learn to put our trust in Thee [There may be some confusion here over the nature of annotations. These differ widely in different Bibles. The annotated Bibles that are best known in the evangelical community tend to have doctrinal notes. E.g. the Scofield reference Bible is given a good deal of credit for the spread of dispensational theology. At the other end, there are Bibles with rather minimal annotations, that act primarily as an extension of the translation, as in the Good News Bible, where now and then there are footnotes where some passage needed clarification that would have been too long to put in the text itself. The annotated versions I've used give historical, cultural, and literary background, but avoid making any specific interpretations of the text. This probably falls somewhere in the middle. The original comment was about notes with a reading plan and exegetical notes. I'm inclined to agree that it's probably a mistake to produce a Bible with builtin exegetical comments. As for other notes, I find it useful to have both kinds of Bible. When I'm doing certain kinds of study, it's useful to have a summary of scholarly views. If I'm away from my library, it's much more practical for these to be in the margin of the Bible than for me to have to bring along a shelf full of commentaries. However sometimes I also find it valuable to read one of the straight text versions, with no notes and no section headings, just to get the most direct possible impact of the text. As you may know, Protestant tradition has tended to be not to have notes. This is based on the concept of the "perspicacity of Scripture", which emphasizes that God does not require interpretation by the Church or scholars to speak through the Scripture. Of course few people take this so far as to say that we should do away with scholarly study of the Scripture. But one does not want the results of scholarship to become so pervasive that people confuse it with Scripture itself, or that they become afraid to react to Scripture for themselves. --clh]