esmarix

There are several translations or versions as some call them of the Bible and its a rather long explanation for why that is but I will try to make it brief. The Bible is a library of books written over a very long period, depending on which authors you believe wrote the different books you are looking at a time span from Moses as the first author all the way to John the Baptist being the last, so we are looking at around 1500 years at least. Why mention the timeframe? Well languages evolve over time and therefore it provides an extra challenge when translating. The Bible books are written in many different languages also, for example Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. Whats the issue? well, depending on how deep you want to study certain topics, translators run into the issue of how to convey the meaning of the text from one language to another, and this is far more tricky than people care to think about. Example is Greek and Roman/Latin, Greek is a philosophers language and has built in capacity for examining and explaining stuff that is complex in ways that make sense, Roman/Latin was more of a lawyers or legal system language and did not have the capacity for the same features that Greek had but had other features. So to make it very short, the translators when they translate the Bible have to choose between various approaches: -literal translations, that is translating as close as possible to literally every word, strength is closeness to original, weakness is meaning of expressions can be lost as they cant be easily translated to other languages. -conveying meaning, that is translating so that the meaning of the text is expressed and as clear as possible in the language it is translated to, strength is that its more approachable for many people, weakness is that it is severely prone to misunderstandings and therefore wrong interpretations of the text for the end user - which can be a serious issue when dealing with religion. -middle ground, trying to get the best from both worlds. Strength should be obvious that it provides a sort of middle ground that is acceptable and relatively understandable, weakness is that some parts can seem confusing and may require extra explanations. Some here recommend KJV, I would say that its a good one if you like the first option, however keep in mind that that version is based on the Latin translations of the Bible and not the original languages of Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew and thus can seem very legalistic in places. On top of that KJV is a very strange form of English for many modern readers, but its very interesting as well since many sayings in English come from that exact translation, so its sort of a bonus to understanding parts of the English language. I would recommend something like ESV, which stands for English Standard Version, as it tries to be as faithful as possible and close to the original, like the KJV, except it uses all the extra documents found since the time of KJV which by now are in the tens of thousands when talking about the New Testament. I will cut it off here since this can easily become a much longer post.