Quote:
Originally Posted by John VanSickle  I have opinions only about the KJV, the NKJV, the NIV, and The Living Bible.
My opinion about the KJV and the NIV are mostly based on the fact that I have them in parallel, with Nestle's Greek, on one volume. The NIV seems to take more liberties with the original than the KJV does, although both of them commit their share of mistakes. I am persuaded by this that the NIV translators, more frequently than the KJV translators, succumbed to the temptation to interpret, as opposed to simply translating.
Since the KJV is in many passages meticulously faithful to the original, the vast differences between it and The Living Bible lead me to regard the latter as more of a commentary than a translation. |
I totally agree with your assessment of the NIV and Living Bible translations and can provide factual evidence for such.
Concerning the share of mistakes in the KJV, I agree that some passages (e.g. John 3) have had Greek-English translational errors (corrected in the Modern KJV and others), however I am much more curious as to your implied common root from which the KJV and the NIV originate ... relative to liberties taken with the original ... what NT Greek text do you infer is the original? KJV and NIV come from two totally diametrically opposed approaches to textual criticism ... and the later from a totally rewritten Greek-NT which originated in 1881. I assume you address the Nestle-Aland Greek NT as the origin text from which both translations stem? Which then leads us to the inevitable questions ... how accurate is the Nestle-Aland Greek NT to the original autographs and what factual proof do we have of such?
For a parallel discussion, it should also be noted that the MT(majority text) which generated the KJV and the MT ("majority text" revised by Hodges and Farstad in the spirit of Baron von Soden) which generated the NKJV are vastly different. The NKJV being based upon the Codex Vaticanus (Codex B) to 90% and to the rest of the testimony by merely 10%. Combined with the O.T Hebrew text of Kittel(Biblia Hebraica translated by Kittel), the NKJV provides a path back toward textual chaos, versus the improvement(i.e. correcting the issues with KJV) which it was originally supposed to do. Thus the KJV and NKJV have no common NT Greek textual ancestor. What a shame.
v/r
B.G.