Bible Versions

This is just another article I have enjoyed about bible versions : )

Conversation In A ‘Bible’ Bookstore

“Hello. May I help you?”
“Yes. I’m looking for a Bible I can use in my church. Could you help me?”
“I’d be happy to. I would recommend the NIV. It is our most popular seller.”

“Do you know the story of the Ethiopian eunuch?”
“Sure.”
“Well, the only verse that tells us what we need to do before baptism is in Acts 8:37. It’s really important that my Bible states this clearly. Would you read it to me?”
“Certainly...” (The helpful employee looks and looks.) “Uh, it’s not there.”
“What’s not there?”
“I’m sorry, but there is no verse 37...”
“Well, I don’t want a Bible that is missing something that important. Let’s try another Bible.”

“Well, we have another popular one, the Revised Standard version.”
“My Bible has to be clear about the virgin birth of Christ. Would you please check Isaiah 7:14?”
“Hmm. It says ‘a young woman shall conceive...’”
“Then forget the Revised Standard! What other Bibles have you?”

“Well, we are very proud of the New American Standard. It’s called ‘the most literal’ version.”
“Alright, then let’s look up John 6:47. It’s the one place where Jesus tells us to believe in Him to have eternal life.”
“Wait! It only says ‘he who believes has eternal life.’ It doesn’t say who to believe in.”
“My old occultic friends would love that. They believe, but not in Jesus Christ. So much for the NASV.”

“Let’s try again. When I witness to Jehovah’s Witnesses, I like to use Revelation 1:11, where Jesus says, ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last.’ What do you have left?”
“Here’s our New Living Translation. Let me see. Huh? It says, ‘Write down what you see...’ No ‘Alpha and Omega’ here.

“All I see left is an old American Standard. Would you look up 1 John 5:7? It tells us the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost are one God.”
“I’m very sorry. It says, ‘And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth.’ There’s no Trinity here.”

“Well, then, I’ll just stay with my Bible. It has everything I mentioned to you.”
“What Bible is that?”
“God’s preserved words in English: The King James Bible.”

New Age Bible Versions

New Aged Versions...

This article has started a lot of thinking in my life. I have never really cared about which bible I read, they were just some versions I thought were easier to read... now I strongly believe against that and this is just one article that helped me to start researching that :) I hope it helps inspire some of you .... this is written by a man i highly respect. I have learned almost all my mothering skills from his gentle wife....

New Age Bible Versions
By: Michael Pearl

Some of you have asked why we make available the book New Age Bible Versions. Thirty-five years ago I was a student at a very conservative Bible College.
I was taught the generally accepted, fundamentalist views on inspiration of Scripture. When I first began to read a little Greek, I thought I had arrived. I was reading the Bible in the original language, or so I thought. The Greek, which I thought was THE Greek Bible, was the 25th edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament published by the American Bible Society. After I graduated from Bible college and went on to pastor a church, when I came to a passage in the Bible that didn’t read the way I thought it should, I would search the many other "bibles" until I found a reading that met my doctrinal criterion. I found the Greek lexicons very helpful when I needed to reject a given passage.

I believed as I was taught, that the Scripture which had been "given by inspiration of God" had been lost many years ago, and that at best we could "trust" the almost perfect copies that remained. What I didn’t learn in Bible college is that the Greek New Testament I was using did not even exist until 1898. I thought it was a copy of "the original." Upon investigation, I learned that there are 24 different Greek N Ts, just as there are different English versions. It surprised me to learn that modern scholarship did not believe what I had been taught as a child. I went back to one of the faculty members at my old college and discussed it with him. I discovered that he was not able to hand me just one book in any language and assure me that it was the inerrant, perfect words of God. No one in my college had ever so much as seen such a book.

Needless to say, twenty-eight years ago I launched into a study of manuscript evidences. As a result, I came to believe that the King James Bible is the words of God, and nothing but the words of God, to English speaking people.

Do you believe that the book you call a Bible is the word of God? If it is not a King James Bible, then know that the translators and publishers of your "version" do not believe that your bible is the Bible, the Word of God.

I now reach up and pull a book from the shelf here in my library. Like many of the books in my library it is one that expresses views contrary to my own.

It is a little paperback, sent to the subscribers of Biblical Archeology Review, called The Dead Sea Scrolls After Forty Years. It was published in 1991 by BAR. If you want to read apostasy at its best, subscribe to BAR. I have found it useful in keeping up with the infidels. I open the book to page 60 and read comments by James Sanders, a member of the United Bible Society. He served on the committee that put out the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. He says, "The NRSV is not the Bible; no translation is the Bible. So what is the Bible? What and whence these texts?" On page 62 he continues, "We are now very careful about using the word ’original,’ because we don’t really know what we mean by it." On page 63, he suggests, "[W]e should just drop the word [original, as in original Greek Bible] because we do not have the autographs of anything…" He goes on to answer his question as to where the Bible originated, "Therefore, we have to say that we don’t really know exactly the inception of any of these texts, but they develop into what we call traditioning process."

Do you believe your Bible had an unknown beginning through the various traditions that were slowly collected and assembled over several centuries until they evolved into a document of religious importance? You don’t? One of the "Bible Scholars" responsible for the NRSV does. On page 69 he says, "[T]he stabilization of the text is not yet finished…" He is telling you that what you think is the Bible today may not be the Bible tomorrow. For example, the Greek Bible I studied when I was in College is now different in over 600 places. Words have been changed, deleted or added. It is not the same Greek Bible it was when I was in college studying "the original Greek." Men like Sanders changed it.

He goes on to describe his duties as Bible translator, "We try to reconstruct what was first said or written." Then in a moment of candidacy (page 71), on behalf of his fellow scholars and Bible translators, he says, "I think it is time for us to stop fooling the people, making them think there is just one Bible and that our Bible committee got closer to it than their committee did." Of course that is the sales pitch for any new bible. When a man "fools" you he makes you look like a fool by causing you to believe the ridiculous. Sanders then expresses the reason why the "scholars" deliberately fool the public: "I have been told by some that that [telling the truth as they see it] would just destroy the Bible because lay folk still want to think of the Bible as somehow ’inerrant.’" Are you one of the "lay people" who buys bibles and have been "fooled" lest you learn what the translators are deliberately keeping from you, that the Bible is not inerrant? He concludes with, "It may well be that if there should ever be the possibility of discussing the text of Isaiah with Isaiah, he might very well say, ’But I did not say that.’"

Let me ask you, would you trust a man like that if he changed the Bible text and gave as a reason that the "oldest and best manuscripts read…"? Then could you trust your favorite minister of the gospel who, after reading James Sanders or one like him, should take up the same tune and correct the bible on grounds that "the oldest and best manuscripts…" or "all scholars agree…?" What are the oldest and best manuscripts? Can you trust the marginal notes that so freely alter the Bible text? Do all scholars agree, or just the ones that are "fooling" the people? In this New Age in which we live, Christians are taken to be fools by the "good godly men" that have provided the English speaking people with over 200 "modern translations."

There you have it. Does this concern you? Have you searched out the facts for yourself? I believed the King James Bible is the Word of God 25 years before I read New Age Bible Versions. I have in my library more books on this subject than you could carry in a wheelbarrow. There are many scholars that do not agree with Sanders and his kind. I offer you New Age Bible Versions because among many books on the subject it is the easiest for the layman to understand.

Yes, I have read several authors that have dismissed this book on various grounds, but I also read the book, along with 50 others on the subject—pro and con. Don’t think you are informed just because you read one author that smugly discounted this thoroughly researched work.
There are many that would discourage you from investigating beyond their opinions. Openness and investigation is the enemy of deceit only. If someone would prevent you from reading this or any book on doctrinal issues, ask yourself what they fear and why. Truth doesn’t need to be policed. It can stand alone against all error. So in the name of open dialogue and ready access to information, we offer you New Age Bible Versions, a book that goes behind the scenes and uncovers the plot to change your Bible. Read it and be shocked.

I am not attempting to enter the arena on this issue. We have been called to child training and family ministry. There is an avalanche of material available on this subject, so do not write expecting me to take up the challenge. Others more qualified have said it all better than I ever could. Do your own research. I will read anything you send me as long as it disagrees with my position. There is a web site I have never seen, but I heard it is helpful on this subject.

www.biblebelievers.com

Don’t forget to exercise grace towards those that disagree with you. Even Bible believers need love. Happy research!

Musings

Just thinking about stuff... there is so much going on in this world that is so confusing. Mainly Christians, how have they been so blindly lead astray on so many topics of important like a literal creation which took 6 literal 24hr periods of time called days... to which version of the bible is most accurate. Does this matter? I strongly believe it does. Its like a bunch of people go out to plant a garden and they are all trying to plant the same way, encountering the same weeds, etc... point is they all are experiencing the same gardening task... Some people dwadle around and slowly atempt to plant their seeds in the uncleared land... Some people start weeding out the little weeds and are making a slow attempt at it.. While the last group take back hoes and big machinery to their land and start clearing out the HUGE brush and trees by the burn pile full... I mean they mean business, they are going to plant a garden and they want the land cleared now... so they can start planting their seeds this spring.

This got me thinking and comparing this illustration to Christians who are so flaky about church they dont pray or read their bible, just sort of dwadle around church from time to time.. and the second is Christians who don't see the whole picture, they are just doing such little studying or discussion group stuff they don't know what they are really doing.. and the third group is REALLY rare.. they KNOW there is a spiritual battle going on right now, they want to know what is the truth and what they need to do to start LIVING the life TODAY, right now, not some time a few years from now... topic that are huge to me in Christianity are:

Literal Creation which took 6 days, earth being only about 6,000 years old
KJV being our only English version which we can trust in its entirety
Salvation, what does it take to get to heaven
Sins, when are we forgiven, what if you sin directly after you repent... will you then go to hell?
The end times, rapture, what are Christians to do in the end times... run to the mountains?
Birth control, abortion, family planning, children
Public schools system and evolution vs homeschooling
femininity and modesty and virtuous women of god
denominations and do they even matter as long as you are a christian?

I mean there is so much rattling around in this little brain, and then who can you turn to? who is there to ask questions to that would actually be of help and know the truth? I haven't found a single person who is ON THE PATH OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.... for whom I can ask my many questions of ponderings....

the sad thing to me is that whom ever we do trust around us believes such different things from us ... like hugely different... that how can we even agree on any part of God truth if we don't agree on the huge topics. plus should we even get together to talk to those loved ones arround us if we dissagree so drasticaly? wont we just harm our relatoinship? and offend each other? I'm worried about distancing ourselves rather than drawing each other closer together towards Christ....

.... just musing...