King James bible fraught with "embarrassing inaccuracies"...

I wonder why come if the Bible is God's word, he did such a crummy job of setting it up to avoid problems of translation and the like.

Probably the Devil has something to do with it.

 

perhaps my friend was mixed up. he says the only bibles in a mormon temple are king james versions, though.

 

Well most people in America don't read German.

 

fair enough....i'm not saying that.

my only point was that the church of latter day saints is the only church i'm aware of that regularly uses the KJV.

 

I agree about the KJV being unused, especially in Protestant American churches. But the translation "errors" talked about in the article are the same in the NIV, iirc. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth..."

 

No, I didn't

-- droxford

 

I don't read Greek so I can't help with any NT translation questions but I do read Hebrew and "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth..." Is much more accurate than "When God created..." the word "when" doesn't appear in the verse at all.

 

Sorry, i guess he suggests "When God began to create..." But it doesn't say that either.

 

they are?? that's not my understanding of it at all. my understanding is the NIV and others are not reliant on those translations and don't have the same concerns. they were more concerned with being accurate than ornate.

 

I think the issue is that when you are translating from an ancient text -- not two translators will translate it the same way.

Saying which is more accurate is very subjective. We shouldn't be making life changing decisions based upon one line anyway. The context of the statement combined with what else the Bible has to say that may support the transalation is more important.

but even the "In the beginning..." and "When God began to create..." really are saying the same thing.

God is eternal - he allways was. So the "beginning" in the first translation is the beginning of the world as we know it. They are saying the same thing.

 

I don't necessarily agree with this.

I'm an atheist, mainly due to what I feel is a lack of any concrete evidence that God exists, and the errors present throughout the Bible.

One of the things I always wondered is: Why doesn't the Bible (or Torah) account for the dinosaurs? We've proved that they exist, yet there is no mention of them in the Bible.

The new translation probably gives you more room to work with this problem (if you feel it's a problem at all) by allowing you to differentiate between the "beginning" (ie- there was nothing before this point) and "when God began to create" (with the assumption here that he was creating us and there may or may not have been other creations before us).

So I think it's fair to say that there is a difference in the actual language used.

 

I think the Bible does "account for the dinosaurs" although it doesn't mention them directly. On the fifth day God makes all the things that live in the water and things that fly, on the sixth day are He makes land animals. The text isn't specific about which animals are included (except for people), if it existed, God made them.

As to when this occured, Christians don't agree about the length of time that passes where the text says "and there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day." There is also disagreement about what happened to the dinosaurs (of course, there is secular disagreement on this point as well). Many Christians believe that they became extinct for much the same reasons non-Christians do and that this occured some time before man was created. Others believe it occured after man was created and that some early people may have seen some dinosaurs. There is a passage in Job that describes something that doesn't sound much like anything that is currently alive:

Job 40:
15 "Look at the behemoth, [1]
which I made along with you
and which feeds on grass like an ox.
16 What strength he has in his loins,
what power in the muscles of his belly!
17 His tail [2] sways like a cedar;
the sinews of his thighs are close-knit.
18 His bones are tubes of bronze,
his limbs like rods of iron.
19 He ranks first among the works of God,
yet his Maker can approach him with his sword.
20 The hills bring him their produce,
and all the wild animals play nearby.
21 Under the lotus plants he lies,
hidden among the reeds in the marsh.
22 The lotuses conceal him in their shadow;
the poplars by the stream surround him.
23 When the river rages, he is not alarmed;
he is secure, though the Jordan should surge against his mouth.
24 Can anyone capture him by the eyes, [3]
or trap him and pierce his nose?

 

I still don't see "embarassing inaccuracies" I see different interpretations.

They are both saying that God created the world. A difficult ancient text was translated 2 different ways but the translations still, to me, seem very similiar.

Calling anything mentioned in the article an embarrasing inaccuracy is a giant leap. None of the examples alter one iota the basic truths taught in the Bible.

 

I don't think that this necessarily refers to a dinosaur.

Over 90% of species of animals that have ever existed are extinct now. This could very well be one of those animals.

Also, science has pretty much shown that there was little to no overlap in the time of the dinosaurs and the origins of man. Prehistoric man contended with wooly mammoths and sabertooth tigers, products of the Ice Age, and not precisely dinosaurs. All the real dinosaurs were gone by then.

One of my arguments as to why the Bible is a work of man (as opposed to divinely inspired) is that there is no reference to dinosaurs, or even a decent grasp of basic science. Surely an omniscient God would be able to tell his scribes information that was beyond human knowledge of the time.

But there was no mention of dinosaurs, as there were no archaeologists to find them.

And I've always hated the argument that "You don't know how long each of the 'days' in the story of creation are."

If you're going to make excuses for that, why not just make excuses for the whole thing?

I've found that, generally, people only take the Bible literally when it suits their purpose, and when it doesn't suit their purpose, it's because of the "mysteriousness of God".

 

I think sometimes the problem is looking at the Bible as some kind of history book that needs to fill in all the factual gaps.

That's not what it is. The important parts of the Bible are not the facts (how many "days" it took is really irrelevant). The important parts are the truths. The meanings behind the stories are what's important not the stories themselves.

What happen to dinosaurs is irrelevant to the message of the Bible. How many "days" the creation story encompassed is irrelevant to the message.

 

It seems like a very interesting project for Alter to undertake, to make his own translation of the Bible, but I don't know if other people should be reading it. It is probably adequate to give one a passing understanding on the Pentatuch but, honestly, I would not trust any translation that was written by only one person for anything more in-depth. With other translations that are written by committee, you can hope that personal theological assumptions could be confronted and effaced by co-authors. Things one translator may not have considered (some element of the poetry or perhaps a possible alternate meaning of a word and so on), another might suggest. Alter seems to be flying solo.

 

Ender, I don't see why you're fixated on the dinosaurs. Why should it have to mention them? There are many animals that have gone extinct that it doesn't mention. In fact, I don't think it makes a single reference to protozoa. What does it matter?

 

I thought that there are numerous studies that show that the texts of the bible are some of the most well preserved texts ever in terms of accuracy through the ages.

 

I wouldn't say that passage definately refers to dinosaurs but that it refers to something people probably knew about then that is not walking around today.

Some Christians think there was an overlap, some don't. I'm leaning toward thinking there was an overlap. My reasoning is more theological, but that's a different topic. In any case, I do not subscribe to the "long day" theory myself.

The Bible doesn't spend much time on science but I think there is a good reason for that. The Bible tells the story of God's relationship to man. It outlines what God's moral standard is (and what it isn't) and how man is to be reconciled to God.

As for whether or not the Bible is divinely inspired, of course, I think it is. But my reason for that is not because there are little tidbits of scientific knowledge that could only have come from God. The trouble with that approach is that we don't really know how much people used to know. For example, there is some sort of bug that is described as walking on four legs and using two legs to do something else with (sorry, I really can't remember the passage exactly to look it up, maybe someone else recognizes it) but for a long time this was assumed to be a mistake since we all know that insects have six legs and use them for walking. But it turns out that this was an accurate description of a lotus-type insect. Another example is that there is a passage that refers to the "paths of the sea" (Psalm 8:7-9). For a very long time navigators thought that this was a manner of speech until a couple hundred years ago when someone decided to take that literally and found that a there were clear paths that the currents followed. But the trouble is, couldn't they have known that at one time? Isn't it quite likely that the locust type insect was quite prevelant in the Middle East then as it is now and people might have simply noticed it's behavour? If the Bible says something we currently know about, it can be written off as being part of the landscape of human knowledge at the time. If it says something we don't currently know about, it can be written off as either wrong or "poetic." For those reasons, I don't think it is particularly helpful to look for much in the way of science in the Bible.

To say that the Bible is divinely inspired is not to say that God used the various writers as puppets or channels and that the words are directly Gods. Rather, the position is that God worked in the hearts and minds of the people who wrote the Bible in such a way that what they wrote, in their own words and from their own experiences, was what God wanted us to know about Him and His relationship to us such that the entirety of the Bible is profitable for instruction and wisdom. Even though everyone who wrote individual books of the Bible was as seriously flawed as the rest of us (including being limited in knowledge about things such as dinosaurs) God chose to work through these imperfect vessels in order to get the message to the rest of the world that is sufficient to know what He expects of us. And that is the most important point, isn't it?

What strikes me as most divine about the Bible is the extreme theological consistancy from beginning to end that seems too difficult to pull off amoung many authors who didn't live at the same time unless they were inspired by one very consistent and insistent source. If there is truth to be known about God's character, He has to tell us or we won't know. People can and do make stuff up about what we think God is like but what the Bible is claiming is that this is what He says He is like.

He doesn't really need to tell us much about how the world works, if we are curious about a particular aspect, He gave us brains and the ability to research things to satisfy our various curiousities. If the Bible consisted of multiple, detailed, biological texts others would complain He didn't tell us enough about the Social Sciences, or Math, or Physics.

 

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