[simon]

Technically, "bible fanatics" is only insulting to one religion, Christianity. The Jews observe the Torah, which while being 99'ish percent the same as the OT is technically different because of ordering of the books and the combining of some.

[sp332]

Well the Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons use different "bibles" even though they are largely the same content. So I was including the Jews as well.

[simon]

Yeah, although it pretty much depends on how you define bible.

The Catholics use the KJV with the Apocrypha inserted between the OT and NT. Most of the denominational churches (loosely what you referred to as Protestants) use similar bibles unless you want to be picky over their use of different translations or get into which original manuscript they were translated from. And that's just getting warmed up. I'm into this stuff.

[jemfinch]

Catholics don't use the KJV. King James was a Protestant. The contemporaneous parallel to the KJV used within the Catholic Church is the Douay-Rheims, but even that isn't approved for liturgical use in English; only the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and New American Bible (NAB) are.

The term "apocrypha" is one only used by Protestants, as a pejorative term for the books Luther excised from the Septuagint, the Old Testament used by Jesus and the Apostles. The non-pejorative term is "deuterocanonicals", so-called because they were canonized later than the Old Testament books Luther accepted. Notably, Luther also excluded four New Testament books from his canon: Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, and Revelation. I suppose he found sola fide a lot easier to defend when he didn't have to contend with James' "So you see that a man is justified by works, not by faith." The Reformation didn't follow Luther's lead on the New Testament, though, and that's why Protestant Bibles have 66 books, not 62.

I'd suggest a little more warm up :) Some of us were really into this stuff before departing the faith.

[simon]

Thank you for the pointers, I shall read some more on this.

Sorry you departed the faith. Perhaps, you should have been really, really into this stuff? :-)

[jemfinch]

Being "really, really into this stuff" is why I lost my faith. The deeper I dug, the more I found that none of the meaningful Christian beliefs that I held stood up to the epistemic bar I'd adopted as an adult.

You can read more details at http:?/epistemicfaithcrisis.wordpress.com/ if you're interested.

[lotharbot]

Catholics/Protestants/Orthodox scriptures are almost entirely the same content. Jewish scriptures are a much smaller subset, while Mormon scriptures are a much larger superset.

Specifically: Jewish scripture consists of what is called the "Tanakh" [0], which is the same content as the Protestant Old Testament but in a different order. The Tanakh tells the history of the Jewish people from "origins" to around 500 BC.

Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox scripture (generally called "the Bible") consist of everything in the Tanakh, in this case called the "Old Testament", plus the "New Testament" which tells the story of Jesus and his first generation of followers. Additionally, Catholics and Orthodox include other Jewish writings (pre-Jesus) which mostly fill in the gaps between the two narratives [1]. A number of other post-Jesus writings (such as letters written by early Christians, which tell the history of the next generation of the church) are sometimes included as additional reference material.

(As a brief aside: among Protestants in particular, there's a tendency to use different "translations" which consist of the same material but use different vocabulary and sentence structure. Generally speaking, which translation is used matters only for doctrinal edge cases.)

Mormon scripture consists of the Protestant Old and New Testaments, usually the King James translation, as well as three additional books collectively called the Standard Works [2]. The "Book of Mormon" tells the history of the inhabitants of the Americas. "Doctrine and Covenants" contains official teachings of Mormon leaders, who are considered to be modern-day prophets. "Pearl of Great Price" is kind of a grab bag, consisting of everything from revisions of other parts of the Bible to the controversial "book of Abraham" [3] to the life of Mormon founder Joseph Smith. In addition, Mormons consider their president and his 12 closest advisers to be "prophets, seers, and revelators" [4] whose teachings are more important than scripture.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanakh

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Canon#Canons_of_various_C...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_works

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Abraham - LDS founder Joseph Smith claims this tells the story of Abraham; Egyptologists say it has nothing to do with Abraham.

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophet,_seer,_and_revelator