| For people who aren't Christian or aren't as familiar with the various translations: English translations of the Bible tend to be a tradeoff between making the text easy to read for modern English speakers (at the risk of inserting the translator's own interpretation of the text) versus translating the text literally. The tradeoff is particularly important since some sects of Christianity believe that the specific words of the Bible as originally written were inspired by God. As you might expect, most translations fall somewhere in the middle between literal and readable. The existence of the King James Version (KJV) further complicates things. As I understand it, most scholars would consider it an accurate translation but not necessarily an extremely literal translation. Being written in the 1600s, it doesn't incorporate the most recent scholarship and archeology; e.g. certain verses that scholars no longer think were in the original text[1]. However, because of how culturally influential the KJV is there can be significant resistance to using other versions. The extreme being the King James Only Movement which believes that the KJV is the only acceptable version of the Bible. Wikipedia has pretty good articles on a lot of these subjects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_version_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Only_movement [1] I want to emphasize here: These range from relatively minor differences in wording, to stories that appear to be original but may be in the wrong chronological place in the narrative, to passages (notably the story of "The Woman Caught in Adultery") that may not be original. Although personally I don't think these differences call the reliability of the Bible into question, it's a nuanced subject and you definitely shouldn't just take my word for it. |