NRSV

I had to resort to an audiobook to make it through the New Testament, but it worked. While the reader was a bit dramatic, he helped keep people separate and gave appropriate emphasis in the correct places. I chose this translation because I had heard it was the most "scholarly" and it seemed to be pretty legitimate.

As for the New Testament itself, it was interesting to compare the actual writing to what preachers and conservative Christians think the Bible actually says. The strongest show more impression is found in the four gospels, where Jesus consistently preaches about love for all and getting along with one another. There's no hate, but lots of emphasis on not judging other people. It's sad how distorted this message becomes when in the mouths of the wrong people. Once you get into the letters of Paul and so forth, more of the judgmental ideas start to surface. But if you focus on what Jesus says, it's really all about loving each other.

I think this needs several listens to really understand, so I look forward to going through it again at some point in the future. show less

My latest deep dive subject is biblical history, and on top of my decades-old New Oxford Annotated Bible and my recently purchased Harper Collins Study Bible, I wanted a version without all the extras that might be easier for just reading without distraction. I'm sure not everyone is reviewing the same version here. Mine is the paperback, which was a bargain at $5.99 on Amazon. The print is tiny--I mean the scriptures themselves--and the short footnotes, which are just references or show more alternate readings, are smaller still. The print does appear readable, however, and there may be room for a note here or there, although the margins are very small. I'll treat this as almost a disposable version, and see how long it lasts! I must add though that despite its reputation for being the most accurate translation, the NRSV lacks the poetry that I have come to associate with the bible. No one will be quoting many of these translations alongside Shakespeare, that's for sure. show less

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First off, I don't think I actually would recommend reading the Old Testament (or indeed the Bible) through from start to finish as I did. It wasn't written or compiled to be read in that way, and it doesn't do the text any services to read as if it were a novel, a short story collection, or a book of essays and meditations. I chose this approach because I wanted to feel that I had control of what I was show more reading, and that I was not missing anything, but if you want to get a fair flavour of it, it's probably better to follow one of the many reading guides available online and elsewhere, which are designed both to showcase the good bits and to keep the reader interested.

Second, a lot of it is pretty dull, actually. 2 Chronicles in particular comes close to Mark Twain's description of the Book of Mormon, as "choroform in print". Large chunks of the Pentateuch are lists of laws and, even less exciting, census returns. The historical bits have an awful lot of tediously horrible ethnic cleansing and dynastic struggle, leavened by the occasional good bit (the Saul/David/Solomon succession in particular). The prophets are rather indistinguishable in tone of outrage. I recommend finding some way of skipping the dull bits.

Third, the good bits are indeed good. I've singled out the Book of Job in a previous post; I found the Psalms generally inspiring and uplifting, and I've always been a fan of Ecclesiastes. The narrative histories, which I thought I knew fairly well, still had some surprises for me - in Numbers 12, God smites Moses' sister with leprosy for racism towards Moses' black wife, for instance. There are some fun bits in the prophets - Jonah, and the deuterocanonical addenda to Daniel (Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon). I also rather liked Sirach, aka Ecclesiasticus, which again is deuterocanonical. And 2 Maccabees is a fairly lucid, if brutal, historical note to finish on.

Fourth, there were indeed a few themes running through the entire OT whose importance I hadn't perhaps fully grasped: the importance of God's endowing his people with the land, the importance of the cult of the Temple, and the trauma of the Babylonian exile (which of course shaped most of the text we have very directly). I'm not saying that these are the only or even the main main themes, but that these are the ones whose importance was enhanced for me by reading through the entire thing.

As for the New Testament: it falls rather naturally into three sections. The Gospels and Acts are among the most readable narratives in the Bible; the most striking things are that the three synoptic gospels are so very close to each other, leaving John as the outlier, and that Luke's better Greek prose style comes through in almost any translation of his gospel and Acts. I am also struck every time that the Feeding of the Five Thousand is the only miracle other than the Resurrection reported in all four gospels.

I was much less familiar with the various epistles. They are not as easy to read as the gospels, combining as they do advice on local disputed, personal salutations, declarations about correct practice and belief, and attempts to put words on the ineffable (Hebrews in particular is an attempt at a theological manifesto avant la lettre). I was struck by how hardline Paul is, particularly in the early letters, on the issues that hardliners still stick to today, and also on the question of justification by faith; but there is a significant counterbalance from some of the later letters, especially 1 Peter which seems to be a direct response in some ways. (And the Epistle of Jude seems strangely familiar after 2 Peter ch 2...)

Finally, Revelation is the most Old Testament-y of the New Testament books. (There is nothing like the letters in the Old Testament, and the gospels and Acts are quite different in style from the OT historical books.) Again, Revelation is an attempt to express in words that which cannot be expressed in words; it is clearly not meant to be taken literally, but as one person's attempt to concretise the underlying truths. show less

The NRSV has consistently struck me as a poor comedown from the RSV. I am not able to do a full assessment of the OT portions -- my Hebrew is minimal -- but I have a good grasp of classical / koine Greek and am continually irritated by the way in which the NRSV slides, by choice of words, from translation to paraphrase; in some cases misleading paraphrase.

To take a random example: in the Gospel of John, the chief priests' reply to Pilate's "Behold your king" is not "We have no king but show more Caesar"; instead, it is "We have no king but the emperor". Aside from the fact that the Greek actually says "Kaisara". in the third decade of the first century, under Tiberias, "Caesar" was still a family name and not a title: the new translation gets the implication wrong: not a reference to the person currently holding an office but to a person of a given name.

The text does represent, by and large, the current established Nestle-Aland NT text and the current up-to-date text of the OT and Deuterocanonical books. However, its failures as a translation seem to me to outweigh the advantage of its better source-text.

For all its pervasive use as a liturgical text I cannot recommend this translation. show less