10/16/2016 What is the best Catholic Bible version and Bible criteria for choosing the Bible for you ? (Part 1)
When Choosing your next Bible learn the details.
Bible Canon, Translation Principle, Formal Equivalence, Dynamic Equivalence, Paraphrase, and Biblical Greek Translation Text Type.
Joe Fessenden
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-Catholic-Bible-version Some thoughts on principles and English translations Bibles, but “best” is just not something that can be said because of all the Bible variations and translations.
How best to choose your English translation Bible criteria
Canon
This is the only really important one without different options.
You should make sure you have a bible that includes the full Canon of Scripture, that is, 46 Old Testament and 27 New Testament books. I am not going to engage in the debate about which canon is correct, here. Since you asked for the Catholic Bible, this is the canon.
Translation Principle -
There are four basic translation principles used in scriptural translations. (I’m simplifying a bit, here, but you didn’t ask for a complete treatise on scriptural methodology.)
1. Formal Equivalence -
This is the most precise translation. It seeks to render the text as precisely from the original text as possible. There is a sort of formal equivalence on steroids that is a literal translation; these take each word and translate it then do as little as humanly possible to make sentences form.
2. Dynamic Equivalence -
This takes thoughts and phrases and translates them in a more thought-by-thought process. It renders an often easier-to-read bible, but it sometimes lacks the precision necessary for real deep study since specific words are sometimes important.
3. Paraphrase -
This is, as the name implies, a paraphrase of the bible itself. It’s GREAT for stories and readability, less so for study. I include the bible I give to kids as a default in this (The Picture Bible or The Action Bible, depending on age group). This category includes adult bibles ranging from The Message to complete adaptations like The Cotton Patch Gospel.
4. Biblical Text Greek Translation Type:
1. Septuagint text-type e.g. Alexandrian text-type - Chisianus 45 version which was written around 200-150 B.C.
The Septuagint abbreviation (LXX), the ancient (first centuries BC) Alexandrian translation of Jewish scriptures into earliest Greek translation Koine Greek, which exists in various manuscript versions of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew.
The Septuagint was presumably made for the Jewish community in Egypt when Greek was the common language throughout the region. In the most ancient copies of the Bible which contain the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, the Book of Daniel is not the original Septuagint version, but instead is a copy of Theodotion's translation from the Hebrew, which more closely resembles the Masoretic text.
1 Timothy 6:20
Guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge,
The Alexandrian text-type (also called Neutral or Egyptian), associated with Alexandria, is one of several text-types used in New Testament textual criticism to describe and group the textual characters of biblical manuscripts.
The Vatican Apostolic Library (Latin: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, more commonly called the Vatican Library is the library of the Holy See, located in Vatican City.
Formally established in 1475, although it is much older, it is one of the oldest libraries in the world and contains one of the most significant collections of historical texts.
It has 75,000 codices from throughout history, as well as 1.1 million printed books, which include some 8,500 incunabula.
In March 2014, the Vatican Library began an initial four-year project of digitising its collection of manuscripts, to be made available online.
The Vatican Secret Archives were separated from the library at the beginning of the 17th century; they contain another 150,000 items.
2. The Byzantine text-type (also called Majority Text, Traditional Text, Ecclesiastical Text, Constantinopolitan Text, Antiocheian Text, or Syrian Text) is one of several text-types used in textual criticism to describe the textual character of Greek New Testament manuscripts.
What is the Majority Text? The Democratic method, of textual criticism that uses the “majority rules”
https://www.gotquestions.org/majority-text.html The Greek text as presented is what biblical scholars refer to as the "critical text". The critical text is an eclectic text compiled by a committee that compares readings from a large number of manuscripts in order to determine which reading is most likely to be closest to the original.
3. Textus Receptus (Latin: "Received Text") is the name given to the succession of printed Greek texts of the New Testament. ... Stanley Porter explains, "The Textus Receptus is any form of the Greek text that goes back to the edition of Erasmus and the several late manuscripts he used.
The biblical Textus Receptus constituted the translation-base for the original German Luther Bible, the translation of the extant New Testament into English by William Tyndale, the King James Version in 1611 and in 1769. The Spanish Reina-Valera translation, and most Reformation-era New Testament KIV translations is a copy of Theodotion's translation from the Hebrew, which more closely resembles the Masoretic Text.
The English Standard Version (ESV) is an Majority Text Translation. English translation of the Bible published in 2001 by Crossway. It is a revision of the Revised Standard Version that employs an "essentially literal" democratic translation philosophy.
B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, Greek Text Translation.
They preferred to label the ancestor of the Alexandrian text type the “Neutral text,” meaning that it was relatively unchanged and successively became the more corrupt type of text that they identified as the Alexandrian text.
The so-called Neutral text, chiefly represented by the fourth-century codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, formed the basis of their The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881).
This Bible Greek Text edition—which in Westcott and Hort’s view represented the most accurate and authentic version of the New Testament in the original language available in their day—furnished the death blow to the traditional text published by Erasmus in 1516, also known as Textus Receptus (the “received text”), which had dominated Greek editions and, indirectly, Bible translations (most famously the King James Version) for hundreds of years.
Although the theory of text types still prevails in current text-critical practice, some scholars have recently called to abandon the concept altogether in light of new computer-assisted methods for determining manuscript relationships in a more exact way.
To be sure, there is already a consensus that the various geographic locations traditionally assigned to the text types are incorrect and misleading.
The Greek text as presented is what biblical scholars refer to as the "critical text". The critical text is an eclectic text compiled by a committee that compares readings from a large number of manuscripts in order to determine which reading is most likely to be closest to the original.
Thus “Western text” is not the only misnomer: the geographical labels of the other text types should be considered with suspicion, too. Some scholars prefer to refer to the text types as “textual clusters.”
The Textus Receptus is very similar to the Majority Text, but there are in fact hundreds of differences between the Majority Text and the Textus Receptus.
The Textus Receptus was compiled and edited by Erasmus in the 16th century. Erasmus used several Greek manuscripts, which were eastern / Byzantine in nature.
This explains why the Textus Receptus is very similar to the Majority Text. However, Erasmus by no means had access to all of the Greek manuscripts, so there was no way he could develop a true Majority Text.
The Textus Receptus is based on a very limited number of manuscripts, all of them eastern, and all of them dating to around the 12th century. As a result, compared to the Electic Text and the Majority Text, the Textus Receptus is far less likely to have the most accurate reading.
In the Novum Testamentum Graece (The New Testament KIV in Greek) these differences are known as ‘varients' methods are used to conclude which reading is most likely the original one. This process of determining the most likely reading is known as 'text criticism.’
(End Part 1)