Modern Bible TranslationsMost Bibles are published by publishing houses which also own the rights to their Bibles. A commonly known Bible that is not subject to this situation is the King James Version (KJV). The King James Version, as its name implies, is old (from the era of King James in England) and no copyrights encumber it. Unfortunately, the age (~400 years), and circumstances of its creation, make the King James Version's writing style difficult for readers to understand. The KJV is the only Bible, for now, that will be quoted on the Moral Matrix. Therefore it is recommended that the reader obtain and use a Bible version with which they are comfortable.A popular Bible is the The New International Version, or NIV, by Zondervan Press. It is a reliable Bible for most study. It is not, though, a literal translation. This means that instead of translating words from the original text most directly, the NIV may look at the meaning, as it interprets it, from surrounding text when making a translation. The NIV is good at this, but if we find ourselves dissecting verses for meaning, a literal translation will avoid the problem of dissecting the NIV interpretation instead of the Bible's wording. For those of us that are completely new to the Bible, there are some highly interpreted versions that can be good introductions to the Bible, such as the Good News Bible. For basic study of the Bible, these versions can be very helpful. If we begin to inspect the verses more closely, we may want to move to an NIV Bible. It can be surprising to some of us that large church organizations do not hold the copyrights to modern Bibles. This is a failing of the Church (the body of believers in Christ) in its responsibility to the Great Commission of spreading God's word. Thankfully the publishing houses detected the need where the Church has not. With the growth of the Internet, there are now several volunteer efforts to make various Bible versions available electronically. Unfortunately many of these are efforts are under the encumbrance of some variant of the morally dubious GNU Public License. |