Protestants: What other Bible Translations do you use?

[lak611]

I have a lot of translations that I use, but my favorites are the Douay Rheims (Challoner), and the RSV-CE(2nd edition) which I find are the best for both reading & study.
I also own: RSV, NRSV, NEB, NAB, Revised English Bible, Moffatt, KJV, NKJV in the Nelson Study Bible edition, NASB, NIV,Living Bible, New Living Translation, The Message (New Testamnet only), JB Phillipps’ New Testamnet, Jerusalem Bible, New Jerusalem Bible, Tanakh (Jewish Publication Society), Good News/Today’s English, and Everett Fox’s translation: The Five Books of Moses. That;'s in English.
I have my great-grandmother’s Dutch/Netherlandic Bible that she brought with her when my great-grandparents came to the USA in the 19th Century, and a Dutch New Testament that is the equivalent of the Good News/Today’s English.
In Latin, I have a print copy of Theodore Beza’s Latin New Testament & Psalms (1642), and I have the Latin Vulgate bookmarked at drbo.org/lvb/
I think that’s all…Well, there are some duplicates of some of those. I have other family Bibles (most of them KJV), & a couple of other Bibles with some special study apparatus…many of which I rarely if ever use any more.
My stepfather used to look around at all the Bibles that Mama & I had, and say that, “If all it took to get to Heaven was to own Bibles, you two could get away with murder”…

ETA: See note for "reason for editing…

What are the Moffatt and Lamsa Bibles like? I have never heard of those.

 

[Beachcomber]

When I attended a Protestant church, I became aquainted with the large number of different translations. For purposes of study, I bought parallel Bibles; there’s four or so translations side by side, so you can compare. That is really fascinating and a big help to understanding Scripture, I think.

My personal preference is the NRSV. I like the inclusive language. The one that I don’t much like is The Message. I’m not a particularly conservative person, but the way it reads kind of offended me. It came across as much too irreverent.

 

[Pixie_Dust]

When I attended a Protestant church, I became aquainted with the large number of different translations. For purposes of study, I bought parallel Bibles; there’s four or so translations side by side, so you can compare. That is really fascinating and a big help to understanding Scripture, I think.

I have a KJV/AMP/NASB/NIV Parallel Bible that I loved as a Protestant. I’d still use it if it had all the necessary books in it. I attended a Baptist church that used KJV, but after many years of KJV-onlyism that I finally recovered from, I found that I preferred the NASB and AMP for personal study. I rarely looked at the NIV - aka the Non-Inspired Version. I’ve never liked the NIV. I don’t care who says it’s “easier” to read than KJV, there are some high-falutin’ words in the NIV that I had to look in the KJV to understand. Go figure.

My only Catholic Bibles right now are both NAB. One is a St Joseph’s Edition and the other is the New Catholic Answers Bible that I got mainly for the “Answers” inserts rather than the Biblical text. Probably a carry-over from my KJV-only days, but I’m really starting to like the D-R and hope to own a real copy one day. For now I just use BibleGateway.

My personal preference is the NRSV. I like the inclusive language. The one that I don’t much like is The Message. I’m not a particularly conservative person, but the way it reads kind of offended me. It came across as much too irreverent.

YES! I think that’s JUST what it is that just rubs me the wrong way about The Message. He portrays Jesus as too flippin’ cool and arrogant. (See quoted exerpt in my post in The Message thread.)

 

[NoelFitz]

Edwin (Contarini)

You wrote:
I* sometimes read the LXX for the OT but don’t know Hebrew well enough to use it comfortably for devotional purposes *

I am confused, the LXX is in Greek.

 

[Jerry-Jet]

When I was Protesrtant I used the NASB.

I still think it is the least bad of the Protestant translations.

But just as when it comes to Catholic versions most people value style and readibility any day over accuracy.

 

[Zooey]

What are the Moffatt and Lamsa Bibles like? I have never heard of those.

The Moffatt was first printed in, I believe, the 1930s. It is a dynamic equivalence translation, you might call it the first “modern” Bible. In its early days, it was as controversial as many contemporary versions are today. I like it for comparison purposes: It is different enough that when a passage has become familiar enough that you aren’t really “listening” to it, if that makes sense, I pull it out, and read the same section over in there. Very different…If anyone is annoyed by the way that the Jerusalem Bible says “Yahweh” instead of “Lord”, this one uses “the Eternal” in the same way. I think its worthwhile for its completely different style. (No Deuteros though…).
Lamsa is very close to KJV or RSV. It has an interesting background: George Lamsa was Syrian, & his first language was the modern equivalent of Aramaic, which was of course,the language of Christ. Also, the Syrians had one of the earliest versions of the NT. Lamsa went through, & translated the Bible of his youth, comparing it to the KJV & ASV that were widely used at the time…about the same as Moffaatt, maybe a little later.
Lamsa’s research has been mostly discredited by scholars, but his translation still has fascinating features, especially the Gospels. Because of the similarity of his own childhood speech with the language of Christ, he spotted a lot of interesting idiomatic expressions that would go on by the rest of us. The one that comes to mind: When Jesus said, “It is easier for a **camel **to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven”, Lamsa translates it “It is easier for a rope to go through the eye of a needle”. Rope & camel are almost the same in writing, in Syrian & Aramaic, and there is apparently a common turn of phrase in that part of the world, to exaggerate the size of something, in order to make people first laugh, & then think.
That kind of thing is what I like in it: the interesting explanations of what the Scripture *might *have said, if a stray drop of ink made a blot on the page, & someone without knowledge of idiomatic speech translated it literally…Like the difference between American English, Bristish English, & the English of the Antipodes" all one language, using the same words differently…

---

On a somewhat different note: This thread finally gave me the “push” to go check Amazon & see what the Vulgate is going for these days…It was:thumbsup: **$30 cheaper:thumbsup: ** than the last time/place that I saw it…Needless to say, it will:thumbsup: soon be arriving at my house.
This is all the fault of everybody in this thread!!!

 

[lak611]

The Moffatt was first printed in, I believe, the 1930s. It is a dynamic equivalence translation, you might call it the first “modern” Bible. In its early days, it was as controversial as many contemporary versions are today. I like it for comparison purposes: It is different enough that when a passage has become familiar enough that you aren’t really “listening” to it, if that makes sense, I pull it out, and read the same section over in there. Very different…If anyone is annoyed by the way that the Jerusalem Bible says “Yahweh” instead of “Lord”, this one uses “the Eternal” in the same way. I think its worthwhile for its completely different style. (No Deuteros though…).
Lamsa is very close to KJV or RSV. It has an interesting background: George Lamsa was Syrian, & his first language was the modern equivalent of Aramaic, which was of course,the language of Christ. Also, the Syrians had one of the earliest versions of the NT. Lamsa went through, & translated the Bible of his youth, comparing it to the KJV & ASV that were widely used at the time…about the same as Moffaatt, maybe a little later.
Lamsa’s research has been mostly discredited by scholars, but his translation still has fascinating features, especially the Gospels. Because of the similarity of his own childhood speech with the language of Christ, he spotted a lot of interesting idiomatic expressions that would go on by the rest of us. The one that comes to mind: When Jesus said, “It is easier for a **camel **to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven”, Lamsa translates it “It is easier for a rope to go through the eye of a needle”. Rope & camel are almost the same in writing, in Syrian & Aramaic, and there is apparently a common turn of phrase in that part of the world, to exaggerate the size of something, in order to make people first laugh, & then think.
That kind of thing is what I like in it: the interesting explanations of what the Scripture *might *have said, if a stray drop of ink made a blot on the page, & someone without knowledge of idiomatic speech translated it literally…Like the difference between American English, Bristish English, & the English of the Antipodes" all one language, using the same words differently…

---

On a somewhat different note: This thread finally gave me the “push” to go check Amazon & see what the Vulgate is going for these days…It was:thumbsup: **$30 cheaper:thumbsup: ** than the last time/place that I saw it…Needless to say, it will:thumbsup: soon be arriving at my house.
This is all the fault of everybody in this thread!!!

The Moffatt and Lamsa Bibles sound very interesting, especially Lamsa since Syrian is so close to Aramaic. I would definitely be interested in reading the Lamsa Gospel of Matthew, since it was originally written in Aramaic, not Greek.

 

[SyCarl]

The Moffatt and Lamsa Bibles sound very interesting, especially Lamsa since Syrian is so close to Aramaic. I would definitely be interested in reading the Lamsa Gospel of Matthew, since it was originally written in Aramaic, not Greek.

I had a downloaded copy of the Lamsa Bible at one point (lost when I had to reformat). The Lamsa is based on the Syriac Peshita, but I have heard that there may be some question of the accuracy of the transaltion. You may want to do a search on the issue.

 

[lak611]

I had a downloaded copy of the Lamsa Bible at one point (lost when I had to reformat). The Lamsa is based on the Syriac Peshita, but I have heard that there may be some question of the accuracy of the transaltion. You may want to do a search on the issue.

I will check it out. I was looking to download the Lamsa Bible, but I couldn’t find any links.