Will the Best Bible Please Stand Up?

And you can go visit the cave in Bethlehem where he spent 30 years translating his Vulgate. But this was a translation.

There’s dudes in their caves.

Caves were a big deal back then.

Gotta get yourself a cave. You wanna do some good work, get a cave.

Very cool in the summer, but they could get pretty drafty in the winter. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And this is Data Over Dogma, a podcast where we try to increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat misinformation about the Bible and religion. Other Dan, how are you?

I’m doing well, man. I, I’m excited about this episode. It’s one of those ones where people have been clamoring for it. Hopefully you’ll get some useful information, though you may not get the answer that you’re desperately looking for. Yeah, we’re talking about Bible translations this week.

Or translations of the Bible. Whatever your preference, we’re going to talk about those. And yeah.

And not just translations either; versions. We’re going to talk about like all the things.

There’s going to be some discussion of Versional discussion. Yeah.

That you’re going to sacrifice a version on the altar.

Did you ever see Monster Squad? You remember that movie?

No, I don’t think, I don’t think I did.

Hilarious movie. Check out Monster Squad. Okay. But they’ve got, they’ve got to find a virgin to read this Latin in order to get this spell to work to send these monsters back to their realm.

As you do.

As you do. And they, they’re trying to figure out if they know any virgins and one of them’s sister. They’re like, they’re trying to figure out a good way to ask this. They don’t go about it very well. And then it turns out she was lying. She’s like, I thought you… They were like, I thought you said you were a virgin. She’s like, well, once with Todd, but that doesn’t count. Doesn’t count. And then they get the… A little… Their five-year-old sister to do it instead and she sends the monsters back. But it’s…

Well, that’s, that’s, that’s for the best.

Yeah, but if you ever hear somebody say Wolfman’s got Nards, that is from Monster Squad. So anyway, that is beside the point. We’re going to be talking about translations of the Bible. One of the most common questions I get on social media. I don’t know about you, Dan, but one of the most common questions I get is what is the best translation of the Bible? And hopefully after this episode of the Data Over Dogma podcast, you will never want to ask that question again. No. Because you will be more confused. Yes. You don’t want to know the answer.

You’ll be more. You’ll. You’ll leave more confused than you went in. But, yeah. Edified and educated.

Yes.

And that’s what we’re here for.

Your ed… Edification. What? Ed… Oh, gosh.

No, I think you got it. I think you nailed it. I’m gonna move on, so. All right, Dan, I’m. We’re. Let’s just launch into this.

Let’s do it.

Let’s talk first about where this all comes from. Because there isn’t. Because, you know what you. What we’re getting to eventually is English translations of a compiled group of books that we now call the Bible. But that’s not where it started.

It’s not where it started.

So take us back all the way to the. To the earliest translations of the Bible to. To. I mean, and the Bible is multiple things, right? We’re talking about the.

The.

The Hebrew Bible. We’re talking about the New Testament. These are very different things that happen in very different times.

Yes.

Guide us through it.

Yeah. And. And the idea that the Bible represents a single book or even just a single collection of books is something that has a past and something that. That occurred in a rough point in time. And translations of these texts predate the existence of what we might call the Bible. So we go back to literature that’s being produced in and around Jerusalem, the Northern Kingdom, in the middle of the first millennium BCE when we get to. And a lot of this is being produced in and after the exile and in the Persian period and a bit into the Hellenistic period. So this is between around 600 BCE and down to around, I think, 164-ish BCE is the date of the most recent text of the Hebrew Bible that was composed. But with the exile and the return from exile, you have members of Judah, Judeans, who are kind of spreading out in a few different directions.

Some are in Babylon, some go to Egypt. And we. We know of some communities within Egypt that were made up of. Of Judeans. But once you get a few generations into these places, people are speaking other languages. They’re not speaking the Hebrew in which these texts were originally written. And so our earliest translation of any kind of. Which we know of, of any text that would ultimately make it into the Bible is into Greek. And this was likely executed in the city of Alexandria in Northern Egypt. So in the, the Nile Delta, one of the, the kind of economic and intellectual centers of the ancient world in this time period, probably somewhere in the third century BCE so somewhere between around 300 BCE and 200 BCE we have translations of the Jewish Scriptures. And in this early period, it’s starting with what we know as the Torah, the first five books of Moses, the Pentateuch.

And so you have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are translated from ancient Hebrew into Greek. And these are. There’s a. There’s a text called the Letter of Aristeas, also known as Pseudo-Aristeas, that purports to tell the story of how this all happened. But this is a legendary letter. It’s very, very convenient. There are some miraculous things going on. The king in Egypt is deferring to the knowledge of these Jewish scholars who are on loan from Jerusalem. So I think we’ve talked about it before on the show, but that’s one telling of how this happened in reality. It was probably something that took place a little more organically among the communities in Egypt. And so it was a way to give access to what was considered Scripture to people who did not speak the original languages of the Scriptures.

And so would you say that Greek was sort of. I mean, I know that there was a lot of Greek in Alexandria. Was it? But.0] Dan Beecher: But I mean, we’re talking about a city in Egypt. So, like, the Egyptian people didn’t speak Greek, did they?

So in this time period, Alexander the Great had come through in the previous century. And we refer to this.

He must have been surprised when he got to a place that was called Alexandria, it was like, we have the same name. That’s crazy.

This is. It’s divinely instituted. So he. Yeah, a lot of funny stories about Alexander in Egypt and about Alexander in general. But so he dies around 323 BCE and after that, his generals and other leaders are fighting over control of his kingdom and it kind of gets split up. And the two most relevant groups of people for our purposes are the Seleucids, and they are in the Syria-Palestine area, and then the Ptolemies and they are in Egypt. And so this is a period of Hellenization where Greek is kind of taking over as a lingua franca in the region. So Greek was probably the most widely spoken language by the next century. So by the time of the translation of the earliest texts of the Septuagint into Greek, so within that area, and this was just to facilitate access on the part of those who did not speak the language.

There’s a theory out there, an interesting theory, that the purpose was actually to provide a bit of an interlinear so that people could get kind of a better grasp on what this Hebrew was saying. So some people think it wasn’t necessarily for people who didn’t speak Hebrew, but for people who didn’t speak it particularly well. So there’s this interlinear theory of the Septuagint. I don’t think that works with all the data. But we have this translation and there are some texts of the Pentateuch, at least the translations that have been preserved down to us are very, very literal, overly literal, like they’re rendering the Hebrew into Greek that doesn’t sound very Greek, but sounds more Hebrew. And then there are other texts that are more free. But one of the most interesting things about the translation of the Septuagint is it seems to witness to Hebrew manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible that don’t always line up with the manuscripts that we have now.

The Masoretic text is the traditional authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible. And this is a text.

I think you’ve mentioned them before, but talk about the Masoretes, is that who we’re talking about?

Right. So these were Jewish scribes who primarily lived in the Galilee in the medieval period. And they did a handful of things with the text of the Hebrew Bible. They created a system of vocalization. So Hebrew is not written with vowels. And there have been a couple different attempts in the early centuries of the Common Era to create a system of vowels because you had fewer people who were speaking the Hebrew that they used anciently. And it was just, it made the text more clear if you could clarify precisely what vowels we understand to be intended here. And so they created this system of vowels and they created this text with their specific vocalization or the addition of vowels that they liked. And then they also created a couple other parts to the text, what they call the Masorah Magna and the Masorah Parva or the Great Masorah and the Small Masorah. And these are notes about how frequently words occur, notes about, you know, words that may only occur one time.

And just some kind of technical notes about that. And also you had what they called Ketiv and Qere readings. So they marked certain places where you were supposed to read this differently than what is written on the page and then other places where you were supposed to follow a different vocalization. So, right. They did all this and we have the Aleppo Codex, previously understood to be the earliest version of the Masoretic text, dates to around 900 CE and that is mostly complete.ly complete. A lot of the Pentateuch is missing. Some of it probably burned. Some of it is just. We don’t know where it is. And then the Leningrad Codex is the oldest complete edition of the Masoretic Text. And that dates to about 1008, 1010 CE. And then we just had the sale at auction, like, within the last month of, I think, Codex Sassoon. The Sassoon Codex, which many scholars think is maybe a little bit older than the Aleppo Codex.

But these three manuscripts are almost exactly identical. Like, they very rarely deviate from each other. And when they do, it is primarily in, like, accentuation marks and things like that. So they created a very, very consistent system. And the. So that tradition, the Masoretic Text is what is considered most authoritative within Judaism today. However, when you go back to the Septuagint, it seems to be very different in places.

So the Book of Jeremiah , what is the Septuagint? I don’t know what that is.

So the Septuagint is this ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. And we have some early translations of certain texts that we sometimes refer to as the Old Greek. And then the later Greek translations that became a little more authoritative that were probably done around the turn of the era. So around the time of Jesus, we generally refer to those as the more traditional Septuagint. And like I said, it started with the first five books of Moses. And then over time, all the other books of the Hebrew Bible as we understand it now were translated. But when this was being translated, they did not have what they knew as the Hebrew Bible. There was not a closed canon of texts. And so you have other texts that were also translated into Greek and you had other texts that were being composed in Hebrew and in Aramaic and in Greek. So our earliest translation is the Septuagint, which is also text-critically important because it witnesses to source texts that may be earlier than the Masoretic Text.

What is most authoritative now? The Dead Sea Scrolls. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Over a thousand different manuscripts, many of them biblical manuscripts. And many of them line up with either the Masoretic Text or the tradition we find in the Septuagint or an unknown tradition. And so I mentioned the Book of Jeremiah is about one-sixth shorter in the Septuagint, which indicates either that the translator of the Septuagint was just erasing things left and right, or. Or they had a source text that had not yet had all that other stuff added to it. And we discovered some manuscripts of Jeremiah among the Dead Sea Scrolls that agree more with the Septuagint readings than with the Masoretic Text, indicating that, yes, the Septuagint probably was translating Hebrew manuscripts that were shorter, which would indicate Jeremiah as we have it now has been the product of some textual expansion that someone has added to it.

And there are a handful of other situations that are very similar. The books of Samuel and the books of Kings, for instance, can be very different in the Septuagint. So that’s our earliest known translation. And then I mentioned you had Aramaic speakers as well in the East in Babylon. And so we have some Aramaic translations now. These are a little more free. These are referred to as the Targumim or the Targums. And these are translations into Aramaic that are a little more expansive. So they’re actually, they seem to be introducing more changes and it seems to be more intentional. And so from a text-critical point of view, in other words, if we’re trying to reconstruct what their source text looked like, it’s a little more difficult and doesn’t really seem to give us as clear a view of their source.ce. But there’s a theory that the Targumim were actually translated on the fly, that in a service they would have stood to read in the Hebrew and they would have had someone next to them who would be translating on the fly into Aramaic.

Oh, wow.

That’s, that’s one theory about how some of the Targumim got to be so different from the source text as we understand them. And there, there are other theories about the Targumim and, and we have different versions of the Targumim that expand on some things, try to harmonize passages where there are conflicts in the Masoretic Text or where there’s something that’s interesting or that we don’t have a lot of information, they will expand on that. And so that’s our, the next early translation is into Aramaic what we now know as the Targumim. And I think the earliest manuscripts of that come from like the second and third centuries CE. And so those are the two that predate the development of what we might call a biblical canon because it’s right between the 2nd and 5th century CE that we have kind of the crystallization of the boundaries of what could be considered Scripture within Judaism and Christianity.

This may be a weird question. I’m going to make you define something that it’s a phrase that even I’VE used so far in this, and that is the Hebrew Bible. What are we talking about when we say the phrase Hebrew Bible?

So I use Hebrew Bible because this is a bit more of an academic standard, but more or less it’s the same as the Old Testament. The content is the same. However, when I refer to the Hebrew Bible, I refer to it as it is found within the, for instance, the Leningrad Codex. And if a Jewish person were to open up their scriptures today, it’s a different order of the books. Primarily it has to do with the order that the writings and the prophets go. In the Pentateuch, the books of Moses are the same, but the order of the rest of the books are a bit different. And some of it has to do with the rhetorical goals of this arrangement, this collection of books. So in the Christian Old Testament, it ends with Malachi, which is this finger-wagging threat about Elijah and the great day of the Lord and everything, you know, burning like stubble and all this kind of stuff.

And this kind of sets the table for the New Testament because we’ve got this promise of this something that’s coming, Elijah is coming. And then we go, hey, look, somebody was born. Somebody very special was born. And so it’s kind of segueing into the New Testament. Whereas if you look at the Jewish arrangement of the Hebrew Bible, it ends with 2 Chronicles, which is ending with a description of the return to Israel and the promise of restoration. And so from a Jewish point of view, you want to end the collection ends with looking forward to and hoping for the restoration of this kingdom. So I refer to the Hebrew Bible because I primarily am studying it as it was put together for an ancient Judahite Judean Jewish audience rather than the Christian Old Testament.

Interesting. Is the word Hebrew in that a linguistic reference or a cultural reference?

It’s a bit of both. The majority of the texts are written in Hebrew, but there is some Aramaic, parts of Ezra, parts of Daniel, a couple of words and verses here and there are in Aramaic. So it’s not unilaterally Hebrew, but it is overwhelmingly Hebrew. And so the name is not perfectly accurate. It’s not a perfect name, but it has become the academic convention. Sure.

I don’t mean to get hung up on it. I’m just trying.

No worries.

Keep it all straight.

Yeah, I’m glad to make that clarification because I do get questions about that from time to time as well.

Okay, so is there more to get into with the sort of ancient translations or.he development of a canon.

And they kind of go beyond what we understand as the canon of the Bible. Whether we’re talking about the Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, and we haven’t even talked about the New Testament yet, but we can get into the earliest translations of the Bible after. We can talk about canonization, if you like. And that’s still ancient, but not, not as ancient.

Well, and presumably through this, as we talk about canonization, there were manuscripts, there were books that fell out of favor, that became less popular and so just sort of didn’t make it through into more. I hesitate to use the word modern because we’re not there yet, but in, into popular usage.

Yeah, there, there were a number of them, the Apocrypha that is found in the Catholic deuterocanon and the Orthodox canon. And there are others that we refer to now as Pseudepigrapha that were. Some of them were composed anciently in Hebrew and translated into Greek, some of them were composed in Greek. And this was one of the criteria that some people use kind of retroactively to explain why the Hebrew Bible ended up the way it did, why things like 1 Enoch and Jubilees and these other texts, why they were omitted from the canon. And a lot of people would suggest it’s because they were written in Greek along with some of the apocryphal books. The books of Maccabees, for instance, were not included in the Hebrew biblical canon. And then ultimately they were omitted. Well, they were relegated to deuterocanonical status for the early Christian church. But we also have what we might call apocryphal and pseudepigraphical Christian texts as well, that weren’t included but still get translated by scholars today.

In fact, there are a couple different books, if anyone’s interested in some of the non-canonical texts that were considered authoritative and were very popular in early Judaism, in early Christianity, there are a couple of different places you can look for the New Testament. For instance, there is a translation called A New New Testament, where if you look that up, it’s going to give you a lot of the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical Gospels and other texts.

Wow.

And then Bart Ehrman and Zlatko Plese also translated a text that they called The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament. And this is translations into English of. Oh, let’s see, how many texts are there? 39. 39 different texts that are about Jesus or are secondary Gospels, many of them Gnostic. But some others as well. You can find great English translations of, of all of those in, in that text, The Other Gospels, and then Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. There’s, there are a couple series right now that are translating these into English, but the. James. Is it Charles? No, no, no, no. Charlesworth. There’s a, there’s a gentleman named Charlesworth who translated or borrowed translations of a lot of the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature of the Hebrew Bible that you can find as well.

I think one volume was called. Or no, they’re both The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. One is Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments. One is, I don’t remember what volume two is called.

Can you, can you tell me what you’ve, you’ve said? Pseudepigrapha?

Pseudepigrapha.

Yeah, I don’t. I, I mean, I. Pseudo. I understand what that means. I know what a pig is, but I, something tells me I’ve gotten that wrong.

So Pseudepigrapha means false writings.And the idea is that these are, these are texts that were written in the name of a famous or significant figure from ancient Jewish or, or Christian history, but that was clearly written well after that time period and so was not written by that historical figure such as.

But for some reason we’re not applying that word to Matthew, Mark, Luke.

Yeah, well, that’s the tyranny of tradition because those things get into the, the canon and they’re kind of the heart, the beating heart of the Christian canon. And so Pseudepigrapha is a name that came along much later as scholars were looking at other non canonical stuff. So you have that tyranny of tradition. But many scholars today think maybe words like canonical and non canonical are problematic in and of themselves. They give these texts pride of place in many discussions about periods that predated their canonization. And so that can be problematic as well.

Interesting.

So if we, if we move then into the period following the canonization of the Bible, so in the 4th and 5th centuries, we already have other translations that are taking place within early Christianity. We have the translation of the Bible into Latin and this takes place first, I believe, around the, the third century. They call that the, there’s an early Latin translation, the Vetus Latina. So the Vulgate is the secondary translation there. There are manuscripts of Latin translations that were in circulation for a century before we get to the Vulgate. But the Vulgate was translated at the very end up to around 400 CE by a man named Jerome. And you can go visit the cave in Bethlehem where he spent 30 years translating his Vulgate. But this was a translation.

Dudes in their caves, caves were a.

Big deal back then.

You gotta get yourself a cave. You want to do some good work, get a cave.

Very cool in the summer, but they could get pretty drafty in the winter. And so we have the translation into Latin. We have an early Latin, and then we have the Vulgate around 400 CE. And this is being done primarily from the Septuagint. And this is an interesting thing. Early Christians overwhelmingly used the Septuagint. They didn’t use the Hebrew manuscripts. And so when we look in the New Testament, most of the quotations from the Hebrew Bible are quotations of the Greek translation, which is why they frequently differ.

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

It is. And if Christians compare the quotes in the New Testament to their Old Testament, which is going to be a translation from the Masoretic text, not the Septuagint, in most instances, if we’re talking about Greek Orthodox Church or other Eastern traditions, they still use a Septuagint. But you’re going to see differences. And those differences are sometimes very, very meaningful. Sometimes they’re not as big a deal, but sometimes they. They’re very meaningful. And they were so convinced that the Septuagint was the true version of the Scriptures that you have a lot of accusations that the Jewish folks have altered the text of the Bible to make it less Messianic, to make it not point to Jesus.

Okay.

And in reality, what was going on is they were using a Greek translation that was. That had been executed in a period when there was a lot more fervent Messianism. And so the Septuagint feels more Messianic because it was translated in a time when they were interpreting a lot of these texts messianically.

They were trying to point to Jesus.

Well, to a messiah. And then the Jesus tradition developed in light of what was being expected in that text.nd so the early Christians would look at the Septuagint and say, yeah, this is about Jesus. Why are they using these Hebrew texts that aren’t about Jesus? And so they accused them of altering the text, which was the opposite. The opposite right of what the case was. And you have Origen of Alexandria creates what’s called the Hexapla, which is a bunch of different versions of the Hebrew Bible side by side in columns, including a transliteration of the Hebrew and a translation into Greek. And then we have these different. What we call recensions of the Greek, which are basically. Someone took the Greek and redacted it, edited it a little bit to kind of bring it into alignment with the developing understanding of a standardized Hebrew Bible text. So there was a trajectory from more variation towards what would ultimately become the standardized Masoretic text.

And so I. I will say I read. I was. I. In sort of trying to do research for this episode. I was reading just on Wikipedia about that, about, you know, the. What did you just call it?

The recensions. Yes.

And I. And it said. I’m sorry, the name of the guy who did that.

There were. There were three main ones. Symmachus is one. Is that who you’re thinking of?

No, you. You had just talked about him. Gosh dang it. I’m trying to find him on the.

On.

On.

Oh, Origen.

Yeah.

Yes, okay. Yes, yes.

We’re talking about Origen stories here. And I read this. This sentence and was like, I don’t know what I’m doing here. You’d think that on Wikipedia, I’d at least be able to understand what I’m reading. But when I read the sentence. His eclectic recension of the Septuagint had a significant influence on the Old Testament text in several important manuscripts. I was like, I don’t know. I. I know. I. Here’s the thing. I know the word eclectic, but I don’t think I know it in the. How it’s being used here.

Yeah.

Recension is something. Septuagint is something. I. It was. Yeah. So I’m glad that we’re doing this, so. Because eclectic isn’t like. He just had a wild way of doing it. That’s not what we’re talking about.

Eclectic means drawing from different sources.

Right.

And so that the Hexapla is. Is taking these columns of the text from different sources. Some of it’s coming from a straightforward translation, a transliteration, one of these recensions. So Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion are the three men in the 2nd century CE who. Who create these recensions of the Septuagint. So the text is. Is being altered and developed and negotiated as we’re going, both in Hebrew as well as in translation. And so Jerome was actually one of the ones who wanted to return to what he called the Hebraica veritas, or the truth of the Hebrew. He advocated for the primacy, the priority of the Hebrew manuscripts over and against the Septuagint. He still used the Septuagint in creating the, the Vulgate. And, but that was kind of the turning point where Christianity went from the Greek is right, the Hebrew is wrong to kind of going back to, okay, fine, the Hebrew, the Hebrew is right, but the Vulgate would become the master document, the, the database basically for the Scriptures for the next thousand plus years.the next thousand plus years.

That would.

And so this is in Latin.

This is in Latin.

And it’s. And, and is. So, so now we’re talking about like the Catholic Church is, is, has, has really started to, has really taken hold as the sort of dominant as, as the only Christian organization in at least Eastern Europe or Western Europe.

Western Europe, yeah, yeah. The Catholic Church was the main institution of Christianity in Western Europe. And in the Eastern Church, they were still using the Septuagint. But we also have another tradition. In the early 4th century, around the time of Nicaea and the development of our canon, we had some missionaries who went south to a place called Aksum, which is the kingdom that is now known as Ethiopia, and they took the manuscripts of the Septuagint with them. Now, this is before they had whittled it down to what we now know as the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and even the Apocrypha. So what they took down to what we now know as Ethiopia was a much larger set of texts. And Christianity took hold in the kingdom of Aksum independent of what was going on up north with the Western Church and the Eastern Church. And they’re doing their thing and they’re fighting and they’re arguing and they’re having schisms and down south they’re just carrying on.

And so their canon is the largest canon in the world. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has all the texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, as well as the Apocrypha as well as other texts. So they still have versions of 1 Enoch and different books of the Maccabees and even some other texts that don’t have a counterpart in our Hebrew and Greek canons and deuterocanons. And so one of the other early translations was into a language we call Geez or Ethiopic. And in fact, our earliest manuscripts of the Book of Enoch are in Ethiopic, at least our earliest full manuscripts. And then we found some fragmentary manuscripts of 1 Enoch among the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so we’re kind of able to kind of look at the development of the text between the Hebrew of some of the fragmentary Hebrew manuscripts in the Dead Sea Scrolls and then our.

Ethiopic. Ethiopic. Oh my gosh. Ethiopic manuscripts, which are primarily from like the 11th, 12th, 13th century CE. So while all this is going on up north with Greek and Latin, we also have the Ethiopic, the Geez translations going on in Africa. And then there’s also some translations into Gothic as missionaries are trying to branch out further into Europe. There are very early translations in the west into Gothic languages and then in the east into Slavic languages like Old Church Slavonic and things like that going on in the 5th and the 6th century CE. And so these translations, these ancient manuscripts, are also very important for text-critical purposes, for trying to understand the development of the text. And I think I left out Syriac. So I guess that is another. It’s a type of Aramaic, but early Syriac Christianity and what is now Iraq.

Some of our earliest translations of the New Testament, as well as some of the Hebrew Bible, as well as translations of the Hebrew Bible are into Syriac. And they were in use among Christian communities in Iraq. And some of those communities still exist down to this day. And that’s one of the reasons that Aramaic still exists. It’s largely known as Neo-Assyrian today. But these are pockets of Christian communities that have existed in Iraq since the 2nd and 3rd century CE. So there are translations that are taking place in all of the places where Christianity is getting a toehold, whether it’s Africa or Italy or deeper into Germanic Europe or into Eastern Europe around Russia or among the Syriac Aramaic Christians in, in Iraq.18.820] Dan McClellan: So lots of different translations going on very quickly once the canon develops.

Interesting that it would, you know, that the Goths would get their own translation, but everybody in Western Europe so far, they have to hear it in the Latin.

And that’s primarily because of the institutional concerns. The institution wants to unify and wants to be able to oversee what’s going on. And so they want things to be carried on in the ecclesiastical Latin. And that’s going to, that’s going to be the thorn in the side of early English translators of the Bible.

Right. And I propose that we take a break right now.

Okay.

And we will come back and get to English translations.

Excellent. Hey everybody, have you ever wondered how you can support the Data over Dogma podcast?

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Thank you.

All right, and we’re back. And when we last left this humble little book, it had been stuck in the Latin and the Gothic and the Slavic and the Geez. But the poor French and English had nothing. The Spanish, forget about it. So we got to get it into our language. How does that happen?

Well, that actually starts off pretty soon after all these other translations are being rendered. Our earliest translations into English are glosses and interlinear translations, basically attempts by people to take the Latin translation and render it in a way that’s going to be more accessible to the common folk who may not know Latin as well. And these were kind of, we might call them rogue translations. They’re not endorsed by anybody. They’re not official. But influential Christians in the church started rendering glosses primarily of the Gospels and the Book of Psalms . And so the Venerable Bede, who was most active in the early 8th century CE, is said to have translated the Gospel of John into English shortly before his death.

We met him talking about Easter.

Talking about Easter, right. He wrote this long text on the reckoning of time and gave us a lot of great information about their calendar. Calendars anciently were so much more important and significant than they tend to be today. But we have a handful of other folks who are either writing translations into English in the margins of manuscripts of the Vulgate.

Oh, wow.

Okay. And those are some of our earliest translations into English in between around 600 and 1000 CE. And this is Old English, so not the kind of thing someone today is going to be able to easily recognize or read. And then we have some Anglo-Saxon translations after the year 1000 that are very much in a similar vein, only they’re branching out beyond the Gospels and the Book of Psalms to Genesis and Exodus and things like that.0:09.500] Dan Beecher: These aren’t.

These aren’t important translations. They’re just sort of jotted down.

Yeah. Not. Not phenomenally influential translations. They were no doubt used in their time and in their place and were probably very helpful for folks who otherwise couldn’t have accessed the text or gained much purchase on understanding the text. But. But yeah, they’re not incredibly influential. Now, the first full translation of the Bible into English that we get is known as the Wycliffe Bible, after John Wycliffe—or Wyclif if you’re nasty. And scholars are pretty sure that he is not responsible for translating the whole thing, though it was probably him and his followers who were responsible for translating that Bible. But it was based on the Latin Vulgate, so it’s just—it was an English translation of the Latin Vulgate rather than something that went back to the source text.

And the same is true. I probably should have mentioned it, but the same is true of these other translations, these glosses of Psalms and the Gospels and everything. They’re translating the Latin; they’re not translating the ancient Hebrew and the ancient Greek. And that’s—that was published around 1382. And this is, this is before the printing press. So this is hand-copied manuscripts that we have. So they were not widely disseminated.

Was, was Wycliffe—Wycliffe—was he a monk? Was he a holy man of some sort?

Yeah, I, I don’t remember exactly what title he held, but I can pull it up real quick. An English scholastic philosopher, theologian, biblical translator, reformer, Catholic priest, and a seminary professor at the University of Oxford.

Okay, so. And all of those things tended to overlap with each other to some degree.

Yeah, scholarship was almost exclusively done by priests and that sort of thing. Yeah, priests or people who held university posts, which, and they were frequently given to priests and things like that. So Wycliffe is—kind of marks the transition into what we might refer to as the Reformation. And then we get Martin Luther, who is translating into German. And one of the first things that Martin Luther does is translates the New Testament and then the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, into German. But rather than going from the Latin, Martin Luther is going to go directly from the Greek and from the Hebrew.

Oh, wow.

Now the problem was, up until this point, you couldn’t easily access a critical text of the Greek New Testament. You had manuscripts of certain books of the Greek New Testament available at a variety of libraries, but you couldn’t go to the store and get a Greek New Testament. Latin was the easiest to do. And there was this Dutch scholar named Desiderius Erasmus who was working at the end of the 15th, beginning of the 16th century CE, who wanted to put together an edition of the Latin, the Vulgate New Testament, kind of a new translation. But one of the things he came up with in an effort to kind of outshine the other editions that were going to be out there, was he wanted to provide the Greek source text so that he could show his work. And so what he ended up doing was created a dual-column Latin translation of the New Testament and the Greek. And this was—and he went to his library in Basel, Switzerland, and he said, “give me all the Greek New Testament manuscripts you got.”

And that numbered six. There were two main ones that covered the majority of the New Testament, and then there were four others that he used to kind of fill in some gaps. And there were places where he was like, “I think that probably was more original than this one from my main manuscript.”

44:12.140] [00:44:19.820][00:44:25.660] Dan McClellan: And so he cobbled together from these six manuscripts, a Greek New Testament.

Now, he didn’t have a manuscript that covered the last few verses of Revelation in Greek, so he took the Latin and back translated into Greek. And so it was the. The way he showed his work was not by showing the Greek source for his Latin, but translating the Latin back into Greek.

Oh, my gosh, that’s so funny.

But this.

Do you remember there was a Saturday Night Live sketch where. Where they. They translated a song? I don’t know. The whole setup was that the. Song. This was French singers who. A song had been translated into French and they had translated it back into English for the people.

Anyway, I… I don’t think I remember that one. Was that in the early days?

Yeah, I think that was in the early days, anyway.

Yes.

It’s a classic. It. It. It is a bit of a blunder. You don’t want to re. You don’t want to. It’s. It’s a game of Operation or a game of Telephone at that point.

Yeah, yeah.

Or Telephone or whatever.

But what was so special about what Erasmus produced was this was the first time that anyone had produced what we now would refer to as a critical edition of the Greek New Testament. And so now people could access the Greek New Testament. And so Martin Luther used that as the source text for his translation of the New Testament directly from the Greek. And another dude by the name of William Tyndale, or Tyndale, if you’re nasty, decided he would do the same. Inspired by Martin Luther, he was going to translate the New Testament, only this time into English. And he had to go into hiding in order to do this because the church had outlawed what we call vernacular translations or translations into local languages and dialects. And English was considered one of those. It was.

And these were direct acts of rebellion against the church.

Absolutely. And he. While he was doing this, he was also publishing treatises and things like that, attacking the church. But one of the things that Tyndale did was he changed some of the words that were used. Like, he didn’t like the fact that the New Testament in Latin referred to a church as like an organization, an institution. He thought this is just a gathering of Christians in the New Testament. So he changed it to, I think he used assembly or congregation. I think he used. And then for the priests, he went back to elder and changed a handful of words that were used to support the institution of the church. But that Tyndale thought, nah, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to try to understand the text as it was understood anciently. And Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, which was first published in 1525, 26, we’re not exactly sure which year it was published in, has become the single most influential translation of the Bible that we know.

This inspired Shakespeare. A lot of Shakespeare is taken from Tyndale. There are all kinds of turns of phrase and words that we use in

English, in part because Shakespeare was writing just a little before another very famous

edition of the Bible. Yeah. So Tyndale puts the New Testament out there, and then he starts to translate the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. He gets through the Pentateuch and gets through Samuel and Kings, and I think he does Jonah as well.[00:48:03.540] Dan McClellan: But he’s able to publish that before he’s ultimately burnt at the stake and famously cries out before his death, “O Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” And there are a bunch of very fascinating biographies of Tyndale, but that set the stage for the English translations that would come after. So we have this other guy named Coverdale who comes in and he wants to complete Tyndale’s translation of the Old Testament, but he doesn’t know Hebrew. And so he actually takes—

That is a bit of a stumbling block.

He found a way to get around it. But he took Tyndale’s Old Testament, what he had translated, and then he took the Vulgate and he took the German, and he took other translations of languages that he spoke. Latin and German, for instance, and he translated from those languages into English. And so in 1535, we have the first printed full Bible that was published by Miles Coverdale, and it is the work of William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale together. So the Coverdale Bible is the first full printed English Bible not translated directly from Hebrew manuscripts and Greek and Aramaic manuscripts. And then this gets revised and published by others. You have the Matthew Bible, you have the Geneva Bible, you have the Great Bible. You have the Bishops’ Bible, which is first published in 1568.

And then we have this Hampton Court Conference in 1604 where a gentleman by the name of Reynolds stands up. And this conference is basically between Puritans and the Church of England trying to haggle over how to get along better. And this guy named Reynolds stands up and says we need a new translation of the Bible that we can all unify around. And this guy, this new king, King James, decides he likes this idea and so commissions a new translation of the Bible and he’s hoping that it will replace the Geneva Bible, which at the time was the most popular English Bible translation, but was also very anti-monarchical.

Right.

They weren’t happy about the king. And in fact the Puritans who make it to the Americas are primarily trying to escape from under the thumb of monarchy. And the Geneva Bible is what they took with them. And there were a lot of marginal notes, explanatory notes about how—in support of this idea that you find in a few places in the Bible—the Lord should be our king, and we shouldn’t have any human king.

Talk a little bit about— Because one of the confusing things about this, because I know that we’re going to get into—now that we’re getting into King James commissioning this new Bible, and I know that a lot of the decisions made in the process of making that Bible were political decisions, were decisions that were made to, you know, allay the fears of this group or that group. And, you know, there’s compromises happening. Talk about how a, you know, a translation of the same book could be more or less monarchical or more or less in support of one thing or another.

Yeah, well, one example is the idea—and for some reason I’m blanking on where it is. Oh, that’s going to bother me. But we have this discussion where the text refers to a king as a tyrant, and this is something that is found in the Geneva Bible. And this was one of the things that King James says, “No, we’re not going to use that word,” because we don’t want the biblical text, the Word of God, to be characterizing a monarch as a tyrant.

Even if it was an ancient monarch—this isn’t about King James himself—but he’s like, “Look, even the concept of tyrannical kings, let’s just—let’s just avoid that.”

Yeah.

Let’s just get out of that business.

Well, if you had folks like Puritans and others who could hold up the holy book and say, “This book condemns tyrants and you’re a tyrant,” then that’s a weapon that can be used against the king.used against the king. And you know, from an academic point of view, you may sit down and push up your glasses and say, well, no, technically, actually that, and try to. Well, actually the, the folks holding up the book, but that doesn’t, that didn’t mean anything to them in the early 17th century when what was important was whether or not you could gather a group around you and start a movement against the king. So one of the other rules was that there would be no explanatory footnotes. You would only have footnotes insofar as it was absolutely necessary to explain the sense of a word. And, and this was aimed at removing all the anti-monarchical footnotes. We were not going to have any exposition, any interpretation about why monarchs are bad or why the Lord has to be our king in this translation of the Bible.

Interesting, interesting, yeah. Now you say in this translation of the Bible, but actually the King James is not a translation, is that right? My understanding is that we’re now in version territory.

Yes. So the King James is a very, very conservative revision of, I believe it’s a 1602 edition of the Bishops’ Bible. So this translation that was first translated in 1568. And so they were the translators there were around 50 of them separated into companies. They were sent hard copies of this Bishops’ Bible and they literally wrote the changes into the margins of this printed edition of the Bible. So they’d scratch out a word and then write another word in the margin, or they would put a comma here or a semicolon there. And those hard copies were all gathered up and then collated into a master copy. And they then sent that back out for review. And so it was a very, very conservative revision. And scholars have looked at the 1611 King James Version and suggest that the Hebrew Bible matches Coverdale’s Hebrew Bible about 74% of the time.

It’s word for word what Coverdale had. And the New Testament matches Tyndale’s New Testament over 80% of the time. It’s exactly word for word what Tyndale had. So over the course of almost a century, you had very, very little change between these translations. But this also meant that the language that was being used in this translation was almost a century out of date. And when the King James Version was published in 1611, it was not widely lauded. It was criticized for using language that was out of date and obscurity.

All of that. All of that stuff that we think of, that we read now and we’re like, oh, I don’t understand this. They were having trouble with it then.

Yeah, it was. It was already language that your grandfather used.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. And so it did not become the most popular Bible for decades, I think. In 18. In 1660, the Geneva Bible goes out of print. It no longer has the support of the crown, and so now they can start pushing the King James Version, and that is going to be the only one that is going to have the support of the crown behind it. And it’s just going to flood the market, basically. And there are a number of ways that the King James Version is very deficient when it comes to a translation of the Bible. But I don’t want to get stuck too deep in the weeds on that. I’ll just add that we had a number of new printings and revisions of the King James Version. Most King James versions today are based on one of these revisions and not on the 1611. They’re based on one that was published in 1769 by Benjamin Blayney.

Yeah. So over a century and a half later, Benjamin Blayney revises the King James Version and publishes through Oxford his revision.. And that became known as the Authorized Version. And that is the version that is followed by the overwhelming majority of publishers ever since then. So if you… If you get a 1611 King James Version, that’s not going to be the same as the… Your off-the-shelf KJV that you can find at Barnes and Noble. It’s gonna be a very different translation.

I had no idea about that. You know, I… I have seen that there is a Revised King James Version or a new… A New King James Version or whatever, but I didn’t realize that, like the old King James Version, or at least the version that I know as the old King James Version, isn’t the one that came out of, like, King James never saw it.

Right.

The man himself.

Yeah.

Would never have seen that version. It was a hundred years later.

Yeah. Yeah. And the differences are not huge. They’re pretty small, but there are lots of differences. And then an interesting thing is happening around this time period in the 18th into the 19th century, you’re having a lot of scholars. Remember Erasmus based his Textus Receptus.

That’s what… What we later began to call his edition of the Greek New Testament. He based that on six manuscripts from his library in Switzerland. His second edition added a seventh. And then by the time he was done, I forget exactly how many editions Erasmus published, but he had maybe 12 manuscripts that he was using. We’ve since discovered over 5,000 manuscripts of the New Testament.

That’s not a small number, my friend.

Not a small number. And we now have access to manuscripts that Erasmus only had occasional and very, very limited access to, like Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus. In the 19th century, we discovered Codex Sinaiticus. And these are all 4th century, 4th and 5th century manuscripts of the full New Testament. And we have who knows how many papyri that predate even some of those manuscripts. And so in the 18th and 19th centuries, we discovered a lot more ancient versions of the Greek New Testament. And scholars realized we have a better idea what the New Testament probably looked like in its earliest years. And so you had a movement develop to create a new version of the New Testament that was based off of the new manuscript discoveries. And we refer to this as the critical text. And the other tradition created by Erasmus we refer to as the Textus Receptus, which is Latin for received text.

And you have the first revision of the King James Version to create a New Testament that more closely follows after these new discoveries in 1881 with the Revised Version. And one of the things that the Revised Version does, and later revisions that made a lot of people unhappy, was it took some verses out of the New Testament. When we discovered, hey, these verses aren’t in the earliest copies of the New Testament that we can find. And we even were able to account for how some of these verses got worked into the text. We see some things being copied over from one Gospel into the margins of the manuscript of another Gospel. And then in a later manuscript, they’re actually worked into the very body of that text of the Gospel.

Oh, wow.

And so those things are pulled out. But the Bible publishers don’t want to renumber the verses in the whole chapter because then you’ve got confusion. And so what they do is they just omit the verse entirely and just skip over it. The example is Matthew 17 , where we have Jesus talking to his disciples.s disciples. And if you look in the text, it goes from verse 19 to 20 to 22 to 23. And so verse 21 in most new translations, like the New Revised Standard Version, has been completely omitted. Now it’s usually relegated to a footnote. And it says some ancient manuscripts have this part about, “but this kind comes not out except by fasting and prayer.” And this is actually one of those things we see worked into the manuscript that comes from the Gospel of Mark . And someone scribbled that sentence from the Gospel of Mark into the margins of Codex Sinaiticus. And then we have a later manuscript where what was scribbled in the margin of Codex Sinaiticus is now in the middle of the passage.

And so verse 21 is taken out. And there are, I think, 16 verses in the New Testament that most modern translations of the Bible will omit because we are confident they were not part of the original New Testament, but were later additions to the text.

That’s… Yeah. I mean, when you pointed this out to me and I was going through the different places that you had pointed me in the direction of, it is really interesting to be reading. And you wouldn’t catch it. Like, if you’re just reading it casually, you’re not checking the numbers as you go. But yeah, when you skip from verse three to verse five, it’s like, oh.

You suddenly feel violated. You feel like somebody’s broken into your car. Like, where did the verse go?

Or at very least you feel like, okay, this is, this is not something, you know, you have to look at, you know, fundamentalists who believe that everything is completely God-breathed and that, that, you know, the, the Bible is, is perfect and, and is a perfect document. Okay, which, which Bible? What are you even talking about? Like, there are the, you know, 5,000 manuscripts. Which one is the true Bible? And, you know, the differences are probably minor in most cases, but if we’re leaving out entire verses, we’re changing the ending of an entire chapter on something that’s not insignificant.

Yeah, and there are a couple of places where we have pretty significant amounts of text. For instance, the story of the woman taken in adultery that is at the very end of John 7 and the beginning of John 8 . In our earliest manuscripts, that’s nowhere in the New Testament. It doesn’t show up in our manuscripts until, like, the fifth century. And then in some of our other manuscripts, it shows up in Luke. And then in our later manuscripts, it’s showing up in different parts of the Gospel of John before finally settling at the beginning of John 8 . And so in many contemporary translations of the Bible, you will have double brackets around this story and a footnote explaining that this is not original to the New Testament. This is something that was added later. Now, many people will say, you know, it’s probably historical. It, it sounds like the author. It sounds historical. That’s, I would argue, wishful thinking. But this story is a later addition to the book of John that wasn’t even the first try. They didn’t even put it in John.

They, they put it in Luke. And the other, the other example to which you alluded, I think, was the end of the Gospel of Mark . We have manuscripts that end Mark—very, very early manuscripts that talk about the tomb being empty. And they were fearful, stop. And you know, full stop, end scene, there’s nothing else. And then we have a shorter ending in later manuscripts and then a longer ending. And so if your translation of the Bible has Mark 16 go all the way into like verse 20 or something like that, that’s, that’s the longer ending of Mark. McClellan: There’s another, that’s only a couple verses. Just talks about them going and preaching. But it’s likely that the original version of Mark ended with the disciples running in fear. And some people think this may have to do with the fact that it could have been a performative text.

This could have been something that was intended to be performed on stage rather than read.

Oh, that’s really interesting. I’ve never heard that. That’s fascinating.

Yeah, yeah.

And it is interesting because, because the different endings of Mark, you know, as I was reading that. Yeah. Yeah. In the initial one, if you, if you just look at that first ending, it doesn’t seem to comport with the longer ending. Like it, like, you know, these two, these women are, are just stopped in fear. And then the longer ending, they’re actually going off and, and proclaiming things and stuff. It seems like it’s a totally different unrelated thing.

And, and a lot of scholars think that originally the story ended with the tomb is empty, what now?

Right.

And then as the Jesus tradition develops, people went back and were like, I’ll tell you what now, we went and we, and you know, preached this post-resurrection ministry and all that kind of stuff, which aligns better with the other gospels.

Sometimes you got to add in a little fanfic. It’s just fun.

Yeah. The, the, the series ended and, you know, you’re not satisfied. That’s how my kids feel about Gravity Falls. You know, I want a longer ending to Gravity Falls.

Tell them to write it in.

Nothing’s stopping them. Oh, they, they found plenty of fanfic on, on social media, some of it more appropriate than others. Sure. So, so we have interesting stuff going on in the New Testament of the fact that our translations usually don’t derive from a single ancient manuscript, but from a collation, a study of bunches of manuscripts to try to reconstruct, cobble together what we think the New Testament most likely looked like. And that’s called an eclectic text. Now, the Hebrew Bible is a little bit different. We have that Masoretic Text, we have the Leningrad Codex, which most translations are based on. And if you go look at a Jewish Publication Society translation of the Hebrew Bible, it faithfully follows the Masoretic Text as found in the Leningrad Codex. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls opened up whole new vistas for the translation of the Hebrew Bible because now we have a bunch of earlier manuscripts, a thousand years earlier, that offer different readings in many cases.

So that raises questions for translators. What are we going to do with a Septuagint version of Jeremiah that’s 1/6 shorter? What are we going to do about places where the text is very different in the Dead Sea Scrolls? And when we’ve talked before about Deuteronomy 32:8 and 9 on our podcast, that’s an example of a different reading that was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls where many translators now have just abandoned the Masoretic reading and have just plugged in the reading that we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where instead of the Most High separated the people according to the number of the children of Israel, we now have the Most High separated the people according to the number of the children of God. And so there are scholars currently right now working on a new critical edition of the Hebrew Bible that is an eclectic text, much like the New Testament—the Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition. And what I mean by critical edition is a formal printing of a single text that translators can use to translate the

Hebrew Bible. The New Testament is an eclectic one.8:48.300] Dan McClellan: The Hebrew Bible has long been what we call a diplomatic one. That means there is one manuscript and it’s all based on that one manuscript. But now scholars are moving towards producing eclectic critical editions of the Hebrew Bible that incorporate the insights from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so in the future, you can expect to see English translations of the Bible look a bit different. And I think that probably brings us to wrapping up with some observations about some of the more… …some of the newer translations of the Bible.

I mean, and we got to get to the question, which Bible, which translation should I be looking at when I’m trying to, to read the Bible?

The Bible, it’s kind of like the dictionary. There is no the Bible. There are. That’s a, that’s an abstraction. When I get that question, my response is usually to say it depends what you want to get out of it. If you know, Latter-day Saints, for instance, read the Bible because they want to feel the spirit, they want to feel guided by the spirit. And in that case you just want to find whatever Bible feels the most conducive to that for you. If you want to read, if you want a Bible that facilitates missionary work, if you want to be able to preach to non-believers, you’re going to want to look for a Bible translation that is more accessible to someone outside the church, does not use a lot of jargon, does not use a lot of special terminology. That’s a different translation that you want. If you want to try to understand the original text as clearly and as comprehensively as you can, you’re going to want to look for a more technical, scholarly translation. A lot of different reasons someone can be reading the Bible, which means there are a lot of different reasons someone can be translating the Bible.

But the question usually comes to me from folks who want to know, I want, they want to understand it as clearly and as comprehensively as possible. And so there are, there are a lot of different ways you can go about that. Usually what I recommend for somebody who wants both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament is I will recommend the New Revised Standard Version, which is a revision of a revision of a revision of the King James Version. And this I think is widely considered the most academic scholarly translation of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. And there is actually an updated edition. I don’t even have the updated edition yet in hard copy. But NRSVUE is what you want to look for for the most up-to-date version. And there’s a good, which is also…

My favorite, Law and Order. Law and Order NRSVUE. It’s really good.

That’s the one set in New Orleans, right?

Dun-dun.

And there’s a really good study edition of the NRSV. The New Oxford Annotated Bible is what I usually recommend. It’s got wonderful introductions to the books, it’s got wonderful explanatory footnotes. It even has thematic essays in the back. So the NRSV is the Bible translation I would recommend for most folks. The New Oxford Annotated Bible in the fifth edition is probably the best edition. Another really good one is the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh. Tanakh is an acronym for Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim, or the three different portions of the Hebrew Bible. And there is a second edition of the Jewish Study Bible, which incorporates the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh. So that’s a really good translation. And if you can get their commentary series, particularly their Torah Commentary series, the five different volumes, that offers a lot of additional information. That’s wonderful.[01:12:45.520] Dan McClellan: Robert Alter also in 2019-2020, published his own translation of the Hebrew Bible, which is a wonderful addition.

It’s a more literary translation and Robert Alter is coming to it from the perspective of a scholar of English language and literature. So it’s very, very literary. And the notes are usually focused on how the Hebrew is functioning literarily. So that’s a wonderful translation. I always also highly recommend. And then if you’re looking for a New Testament, I would highly recommend the Jewish Annotated New Testament, which is the NRSV’s New Testament. But the explanatory notes are all composed by Jewish scholars and I believe Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Z. Brettler are two of the contributors to that. So it tries to contextualize what’s going on in the New Testament using early Jewish literature and tradition and things like that to explain how this makes sense within the context of early Judaism. So that’s a wonderful translation as well. Yeah, I highly recommend that. And then there’s also an Oxford Annotated Apocrypha if you want to see those texts that were later taken out.

And I didn’t mention this, but when the King James Version was first translated and published, it included the Apocrypha.

It did. Wow, that is crazy. I had no idea.

Now, Martin Luther moved the Apocrypha, which was originally kind of just interspersed across the Old Testament, moved it all into its own section. So you had Old Testament, Apocrypha, New Testament. That’s how Protestants originally were publishing their Bibles. In the 19th century, you had the British and Foreign Bible Society in the UK and you had the American Bible Society, and you guessed it, America, who were trying to place Bibles in, you know, every home in America, they were doing a big push to try to distribute Bibles and to save cost on printing. They said, you know what, let’s just pull the Apocrypha out. Let’s just do Old and New Testament. That became the norm and that de facto omission of the Apocrypha became the de jure Protestant Bible. So we omit the Apocrypha for most Protestant Bibles today because we wanted to save costs on printing.

Wow. You know, they could have saved a lot more that you can cut any, all the books if you want to.

Just, you can just do a hardcover with some blank pages. And so if you get the NRSV, that’s actually going to include the Apocrypha as well. Yeah. And then there’s one good translation of the Gospels by a translator named Sarah Ruden that I find very interesting. And it uses transliteration for some of the names and the place names. So it might feel a little unusual, a little alien to some folks, but it’s a wonderful literary translation of the Gospels. But I don’t think there’s been a really good, outstanding new translation of the New Testament like we have with Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible. So when people ask about a translation of the New Testament, I’m a little stuck. I would, I would recommend the NRSV and there’s not too much else, but you’re going to find in those translations that some of those verses that were not in the original manuscripts, those are just going to be plucked out and they’re just going to leave that verse number out. So be prepared to be shocked if you’ve never seen that before.

I, I am going to make my own recommendation. I know that this is going to, this, that it blows your mind that I’m going to make my own recommendation. But if you want to have a good time and learn very little about what the Bible actually says, I definitely recommend checking out The Message. It is a version that I stumbled on when I was looking at different versions of the Lord’s Prayer, which go to Matthew, find the Lord’s Prayer in The Message. It’s, it’s a treat. But yeah, you won’t, you, you, you won’t be enlightened in terms of like what the Bible actually is all about, but it’s a lot of fun anyway. All right, well, I, we, we. I know that we could go on for hours about this, but we need to stop. Thank you so much, Dan, for enlightening us on this and maybe we’ll revisit some of these ideas down the road a piece.

I think that’d be cool.

But I think. Well, yeah, I think for now we’ll cut it off. If you, dear listener, dear viewer, would like to become a part of helping to make this show go. We, we encourage you to become a patron. If you’re able to do so, just go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Otherwise you can always write into us if you have any questions, comments or observations. Our email address is contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and other than that, we’ll see you next week.

Have a good day, everybody.