A little reading goes a long way

My wonderful wife has a found a book written by Ron Rhodes. It is called "The Complete Guide to BIBLE TRANSLATIONS". I have not written a post in a while because I am reading it. It confers with all the information I have thus far and adds a little more. The good thing about published work instead of online articles and even wiki is the work has already been reviewed by his peers. Hopefully we will not be able to find any discrepancies in his work. I will read and bring up interesting notes and when I get to the translations we will answer the questions we have set out to do.

Interesting information already is the amount of persecution the early translators into English received. Wycliffe although was not killed his body was exhumed and burned and his ashes thrown into a river. William Tyndale however was strangled and then burned at the stake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale

Praise the Lord for using these men to bring us a translation we can read and understand. That is in no way a affirmation of their translation only a acknowledgement of their sacrifice.

Still more setup

I was a little of the ball this week. Partially because of a busy weekend and the other part because I was thinking of more ways to improve the system. I really don't want to spin my wheels with this because there is so much to cover and time is a little scarce these days.

So I have to ask myself a question. What information is relevant to what I am trying to discover?  

The answer is the following:

Who translated it?

When was it translated and are the current versions the same as the original?

Why they translated it?

What source(s) did they translated it from?

Is it a good, bad, or ugly translation?

I believe these five questions will be a good start to research each translation. Of course in the process other questions may arise and they will be addressed at that time. So now we have are questions. Are way we intend to research those questions and have already started King James. So with Gods help we will find a good rhythm and dive into this.

A need for organization and accountability

I think the next step is to take a look at the translations and find out a little bit more about them.

We can start with KJV

KJV -

Turns out I bit of a pretty big piece of pie here. There is a lot of information to digest and to verify by cross referencing for validity. I will attempt to find information and present it in I hope a semi-coherent fashion. I intend to give links to all referenced material. For some of you this may not be a shock but did you know that King James Version was not the first English translation. Go figure. 

In my search to understand the Bible more completely I came to the realization that I don't even know if the translation I am reading is correct. In order to debate or know something to be true you must have a foundation of that truth. The reason I say this is if you look at the different translation we have that are considered acceptable today by most they have different wording that suggest different things and sometimes completely different meanings.