6 Answers

There isn't anything intrinsically "wrong" with one translation version of Scripture over another. However, it is important to understand the two different "types" of translation methodologies, as well as understanding the important schismatic (from a scriptural standpoint) differences between Protestant (and other) and Catholic Christianity (for the purpose of this answer, we'll lump Orthodox Christians in with Catholic: for more see Vatican Web site, and defining Eastern Orthodoxy as being "near-Catholic"). First let's look at translation methodologies: there's formal equivalency and then there's dynamic equivalency. The first is a direct translation from the source material to another language, the second is a more reader-friendly but non-literal translation style that gets the "tone" of the message across - even the Vatican allows that dynamic translations can be "fruitful" for the faithful's grasp of concept in "modern-day" language they can understand. They are not fruitful for citing or quoting scripture, or making semantic judgments from. All that is fairly cut and dried, but -- and this is a big but -- accuracy of translation (formal that is) is dependent upon which autographs (original source material) the translators have to work from. Further complicating literal translations is loss of semantic meaning over time. Take the word "gay" as it is used today, it has a quite different meaning than say in 1890 (which were often referred to as the Gay Old Nineties), scripture-wise (to cite just one example) let's look at the whole creation of the universe in 7 days issue. Some Christian faiths take it to literally mean 7 24-hr periods. But the actual word in original text has two contexts: first is the literate, proper one (as used by learned folks such as scribes who wrote texts) and one slang or "street use" one; the literal one was seen as "period of time" and the second is how you'd use it today, as in see you tomorrow (the next day). Unfortunately, some have interpreted the word in it's street-use way and not it's educated-scribe kind of way. And this is but one example (and an easy one), so some Christians hold to the literal God-made-the-universe-in-a-week context and others (by far the majority) understand it to mean "in seven periods of time" (which would fit, roughly, some models of our solar system time-wise if period of time is equated to roughly a billion years). See, translation isn't easy stuff and we are prone to see it in OUR context and not the context of the times -- a big, big trap to fall in for translators of anything. Next big "version" hurdle is due to the hubris of men. Originally, scripture was a loose collection of texts (autographs) that along the way got organized (in what we now call the Old Testament) and was split in 3 main parts: the Law (Mosaic law, i.e. the tablets thing), the Prophets (a history of important people like King David, Samuel, etc.) and then (the most contentious of them) the Stories, the collection of texts dealing with a lot of things not covered by the others, but very important in defining events, people and concepts (insofar mostly as man's relationship to God). All well and good, right? Sure, as long as most folks spoke Hebrew and Aramaic and the like. Then around 300BC Alex the Great brought his armies to that region. And suddenly Greek became THE language. For commerce, for most things, and ultimately, for religious purposes ... the educated scribes had switched to Greek mostly (though there were still those in the Temple). So along came a king who said, let's get this collection of texts converted to Greek (I know, I'm omitting chunks of history here) so he gathered religious scholars from all the 12 tribes, 6 from each ... and their translation was called the Septuagint and was written in Greek, it became widely used. So along comes Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, in the eyes of many Jews (no Christians yet!). Now had the Septuagint been scripturally errant, you can be sure Christ would've made that known. He didn't, so we can take it that as translations go, it was a darn good one. Later the Greeks got kicked out and the Romans were edging in (time of Christ), but Greek was still widely used and Latin was just creeping in. Later, St. Jerome translated the Septuagint into Latin ... not directly from Greek, but from original autographs (many of which, alas, are now lost to us). The Latin version hung around a long while. Now we get into more of the hubris of men thing ... Originally, there was no "New Testament" ... there were texts to be sure (Paul's letters for example), but no formalized "Hey, let's call this collection of texts the New Testament!" That took time and many councils to decide. There were debates, often fierce, there were "heretics" ... but the early church understood that their faith was based on 3 things: those collections of texts and the Scripture (Old Testament), word of mouth (more rightly known now as Apostolic Tradition) and exactly who had the authority to teach what to who ... the Magisterium, or teaching authority. According to Scripture accepted by all Christianity, John is quoted as saying that not everything Jesus said or did among his disciples was written down (very, very important point!) ... all that was passed on orally and by example ... that all-important Apostolic Tradition. Now let's jump ahead a bit. In the first century a group of Jewish scholars (who had more than a little bit of an axe to grind with Christians, Romans and others by that point) re-determined what constituted "the Stories" part of the OT. Not a huge deal, though there were arguments galore, even among devote Jews, but boy has it mucked up translations/versions etc. now. Let's jump ahead a lot of years (and sadly missing a bunch of things that would set things in better context) ... the King of England wanted to usurp religious power from Rome (the Pope) ... ruh roh, right Scoobie? And to be fair a lot of cardinals and bishops out from under the Pope's thumb (no cell phones etc. then!) did abuse their power -- the failings of men. But along with the breakdown of royal sovereign power (yay, the newly emerging middle class!) came a lot of chafing about the Vatican's slow-to-change policies. Folks like Calvin, Luther and others wanted change now. But they couldn't really just say "Hey, we're seizing power from the Vatican and we're going to redefine Christianity!" So they did it more in a round-about way. First they had to discredit Scripture ... OT scripture. Remember those Jews who got all in a snit and redetermined what constituted the OT? Yeah, they pointed to that and not Scripture as it existed at the time of Christ. Well folks fell for it and Christianity had a major, major schism. Needless to say, the parts omitted covered things like prayers of intercession, purgatory and much, much more that the Church (the now-named "Catholic" Church) had as basis for a whole lot of things. The protesters even went so far as to mostly toss the importance of Apostolic Tradition (sure, more "conservative" ones kept a good part (Episcopalians for one (who George Carlin termed "Catholic Lite" in some skits)), and for darn sure, there was overall rejection of Magisterium. As an historical note, shortly after Luther et alia, there was a Catholic Reformation (which was in the works, but impatient headstrong men didn't want to wait for the stodgy ol' Church to do it). Anyway, they couldn't just toss the parts of OT scripture they didn't like, so they coined with a term (Apocrypha) that means, "hey, it's good to know this stuff, but it is not Scripture." There were tons of issues with the King James translation (some legitimate, most importantly the translators didn't have access to all the original autographs), so they had to make do with collections of copies (ironically supplied by a scholarly Catholic priest). It's been downhill translation-wise since for a lot of reasons "religious," philosophical, secular-power based and so forth. The end result is that today, where we had but ONE church (Catholic stems from the Greek word kata holis, of the whole ... or loosely, universal) today there are approximately 30 thousand some Christian sects! Most of them in Texas (sorry, I just couldn't resist that), and each with their own reasons to justify their existence and reasons for schisming. Which, unfortunately, has also involved some whole-cloth rewriting of Scripture, falsification of history and general histrionic historical shenanigans that have cause even more confusion. The hubris of men and each of them thinking themselves right and justified in the name of God. What fools these mortals be.

Nothing wrong with it. They just use their own wordings to mean the same thing. http://gloryriders.com/KJV.html 

What is wrong with the NIV compared to the original transcripts? Nothing other than words were changed to fit agendas. 

Colleen

We posted at the same time. No worries, be as long winded as you want.Just understand the very few if any will take the time to read all you wrote ;)

They all tell a pack of lies.

They all tell a pack of lies.

They all tell a pack of lies.