The Bible This Year

Jerome Studies Scripture

Art by Lowgan

At the start of each year for the last few of them my wife and I begin using new Bible translations for our daily studies. We do this in hopes that the unfamiliar words will perhaps shake us loose from an unexamined assumption now and then. I also use the translation here as much as possible for the same reason.

Last year we both tried The Voice, a very interesting Bible that uses out-of-the-ordinary wording and page design to force you to think about what you're reading. If you want a translation that's as far from the King James Version as possible, that's the one for you.

The year before that I used the little-known Easy to Read Version (ERV), which became one of my all time favorites.  It can be tricky to extract the meaning from the Bible's foreign languages (hebrew and greek) and put it accurately into english, especially simple, commonplace english. But the ERV translators have a knack for doing just that and are so good at it that I kept finding myself smiling at how well they rendered this or that verse.

For 2016 I wanted to use the New Jerusalem Bible, a translation near and dear to my heart. In fact I actually am using it for my personal studies, but unfortunately it's one of the few Bibles BibleGateway -- to which I link all this blog's scriptures -- doesn't have. In fact nobody online does, with the sole exception of Catholic.org, but theirs is homely, drowning in ads, and very awkward to use.

So this year I finally chose the venerable Good News Bible to be the 2nd translation on Authentic Light. I've used the GNB off and on for years and owned several copies (that fell apart), but I've never really been enthused about it. However it has this one irritating habit: whenever I read a scripture and think, "You know, a better way to translate that verse would be..."  the Good News Bible frequently has already translated it that way. You may have noticed that I quoted it a couple of times on my Wednesday post.

Translating "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil," (Matthew 5.17) as "I have not come to do away with them, but to make their teachings come true" is just exactly right.

Plus it's the script of my all-time favorite Jesus film, The Gospel of John. You can really see what an effective version it is in that movie, with people acting it out.

So for this year, the Good News Bible it is.  Always backed up, as usual, by my primary version, the NET Bible.

2015: Alive and Moving

"...sharper than a double-edged sword..."

Welcome to 2015 everybody. You may remember that I declared last year as one of "reading the Bible again for the first time," and used the Easy-to-Read Version (ERV) as much as possible in my posts. It turned out to be an outstanding translation that really conveyed a lot of what the Bible says without using a lot of religious slang. I plan to do a review of the ERV here soon and recommend it to anyone who wants a simple, refreshing Bible translation this under-girded by top quality scholarship.

My wife and I follow a Bible reading plan to keep us focused and we have also gotten in the habit of switching out the translations we use each year. The point is to hear the Bible in a way you haven't before and evaluate the differences you find. It's easy now in our push-button, high-tech 21st century world thanks to sites like the Biblegateway where most versions are available for free. In 2014 I used the Easy-to-Read Version, of course, and my wife chose the New American Bible, a Catholic translation.

For 2015 Rose asked me if I could recommend a translation that would "shake her loose from her King James mindset." And I couldn't think of any better than the feisty little rebel Bible called The Voice. It's a version that renders the words of scripture in the language of modern story telling, stubbornly refusing to use any traditional Christian jargon at all. It's also not afraid to add information to the text (in italics) that was plain to everybody when the Bible was written but utterly lost on us modern western readers 2000+ years later.

So I've decided that for me this will be another "year of reading the Bible for the first time," only this time using the Voice as my version of choice. Naturally I'll still turn to the NET or other trustworthy version (or just translate it myself if I have to) if the Voice goes off the rails. But I like the Voice because it's translators remember that the Word of God is not just a book of comforting, familiar platitudes...

The word of God, you see, is alive and moving; sharper than a double-edged sword; piercing the divide between soul and spirit, joints and marrow; able to judge the thoughts and will of the heart.

Letter to the Hebrews 4.12, the Voice