I’ve noticed that different Bibles (Catholic Bibles with Catholic approval) say different things. I was just curious how this could be, I thought the Bible was without err? How can the the Church approve a Bible that says something different from another Church approved Bible?
Well they shouldn’t. Often if you run into a passage that that seems to be the case it’s because the language of the translation and you differ so you are giving the words a meaning different than the translator intended.
Idioms are especially that way. I know a lady that the first time she met her husband to be in England, he asked her out for a date and said he would come by and knock her up around 7.
Well to him knocking someone up meant that you would knock on the door, in her English knocking someone up meant to get her pregnant.
Now she of course understood that she understood the phrase differently so she asked and found out what he meant.
In any case, that’s the most common difference. But realize too that as knowledge has changed there are indeed cases where an older Bible can be teaching something that is a bit of a mistake as far as the language because our knowledge of language is never perfect.
We talked for instance about the use of the term unicorn in basically all older translations and how they thought the animal referenced was a rhinocerous, the single horned rhinocerous, because they basically did not know what the Hebrew word meant. Whereas later study showed it to be an extinct species of oxen. And so you see a difference between older and newer texts in cases like that.
Or you have differences in scribal errors and additions or subtractions. That in some ways hasn’t been as big of an issue in the Catholic Church because the Vulgate did not contain many of the Byzantine errors that are shown in say the KJV, but what did happen was that errors and additions and subtractions did occcur in the Latin family of manuscripts as well so there have been efforts several times to correct and standardize the Latin again.
In any case most of the time if you thing two translations are saying something differnt they aren’t and it’s a relatively simple matter to correct the misunderstanding with study.
I see you are going to post the examples that caused a problem for you, I will help if I can at that time.
JJ