Gwich’in is rated as one of the most difficult languages in the world, probably harder than Chinese. …There are 24 vowels and 46 consonants and the majority of words are verbs; even colors are verbs.
The Bible’s long history of development, reflecting many voices, and the fact that it’s usually read in translation invite our engagement with it not merely as passive recipients of a fixed meaning but as unique individuals bringing different points of view to bear.
Attachment to the cultural icon of the Bible is similarly debilitating. It’s a false image, an idol. If you see it, kill it. The Bible is dead; long live the Bible. Not as the book of answers but as a library of questions, not as a wellspring of truth but as a pool of imagination, a place that hosts our explorations, rich in ambiguity, contradiction, and argument.
The effect of the KJV on the way people write – and think – can be seen in works from the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. to the spare prose of Ernest Hemingway to Milton’s “Paradise Lost” to the text of Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” to the style Herman Melville employed in “Moby Dick.
If you’re one of those people with a nagging feeling that you should know more about the Bible than you do — or even if you can recite chapter and verse (but don’t know that those chapters and verses come from a 13th century archbishop of Canterbury and a 16th century Parisian, respectively) — then these five basic things will catapult you to a new level of biblical literacy.
Now “booty,” a word that sets off snickers in Sunday school, will be replaced by the “spoils” of war when the newest edition of the New American Bible, the English-language Catholic Bible, comes out on Ash Wednesday, March 9.
Since the Bible never offers anything like a straightforward set of teachings about marriage, desire, or God’s perspective on the human body, the only way to pretend that it does is to refuse to read it. If we do take the time to read the Bible, we are likely to discover that the biblical writers do not agree with us, whatever version of sexual morality we are seeking to promote.
Do we worship God or the words about God? Is the Bible the Word of God, or is that Jesus? Christians have been working out
James Naughtie writes, The idea of a new translation was meant to be an instrument for sorting out the wild politics of the Church of