but this is all quibbling.
and hey, chuck, while you're at it, why not check out the gnostic stuff, too?
i believe bentley layton's "the gnostic scriptures" is available in paperback.
> From: Kenneth MacKendrick <kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 03:01:24 -0700
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: Re: Tee Vee
>
> At 01:13 PM 10/8/01 -0700, you wrote:
>
>> Getting back to books. I got a copy of the Qur'an and started that,
>> and then realized I should have started with the OT. Sounds
>> ridiculous, but I've never actually sat down and read it.
>
> I can say I've been through the entire text, more than once. I even looked
> at Jerome for a while... but as an undergrad... I understood nothing.
>
>> So here is an amusing problem. I discovered there has been some kind
>> of revisionist move afoot for decades to re-write the bible. I found
>> one new translation after another and they all read like shit. It
>> seems to me there was a whole wave of these bogus bibles put out
>> sometime after the Sixties---their popularity is testified to by their
>> ubiquitous presence in used books stores. I finally found a copy of
>> the Cambridge, King James version complete with the Apocrypha. This is
>> the one I remember. So I bought it for nine bucks. It had never been
>> opened. Inside I found a publishers ad card and a packing slip
>> dated 7/8/57, marked as an examination copy. So the book had been sent
>> as a promotion for a text. The ad card is titled, The Bible as
>> Literature.
>
>
> The RSV, Revised Standard Version is, really, the only copy worth reading
> if you're looking for any textual accuracy in translation. I generally use
> the NRSV which is similar but self-acknowledgedly inclusifies the text (men
> is men, but man is humankind... that kind of thing). The movement afoot was
> an attempt, I think, to indoctrinate the interpretations / text. Nothing
> slants an interpretation more than a translation. Each the translations,
> which are more and more common, have a particular 'take.' It is wonderful
> to compare them. At one point I compared seven or eight translations of the
> same passage... extraordinary differences overall, from past to present
> tense, the objects described... and so on. Check to see who is publishing
> it, read all the material in the introduction... just like you would with a
> dictionary... looking to see where the definitions are drawn from.
>
> Other than that, I'm not much use here.
>
> ken
>
>