Bible 100

The Bible. God's written word to mankind. The beginning of what we know now as the Bible was originally given/written by Moses in the desert and continued all the way until the apostle John recieved his revelation on the island of Patmos while he was exiled. The primary purpose of the Bible is to tell mankind of its mortal condition of being born and enslaved to sin, with plenty of examples, then to prophesy about what must take place in order for redemption to take place, and what life should look like after that redemption has taken place. The Bible is not an exhaustive list of do's and don't or history. It is filled with precepts that if properly extracted givve us a clear picture of what righteousness ought to look like and how we ought to live. Many people will point out the fact that a very specific sin is not listed within the pages of the Bible which if extrapolated fully would render us with very little instruction. vV Translations. Always a hot topic! There are a myriad of Bible translations floating around and some, mainly the KJV (King James Version), maintaining a cult like ferver. Obvioiusly the main reason we have translations is because most of us can't read/speak/write biblical hebrew/aramaic and Koine Greek. So these text need to be put in a language/syntax we can understand and assimlate. Given the age of some of the text and with the changing of, or lose of meanings of words (etymology) it is sometimes possible to get slightly, or sometimes large, variations of meanings. So Bible translators take verying approaches to translating to try to recapture the original meaning of a word. That brings us to the two main types of translations. Word for word translations and thought for thought translations. Word for word translators take aim at keeping the original meaning of the original word while maintaining a proper readable structure to be understandable. The strength of this comes when you start getting into serious Bible study. You largely have the capability of taking a concordance or lexicon and researching the orignal definition of a word. You will start to see the difficulty in translating itself as there will sometimes be a number of different definitions for that word. It can help you pull or stregthen a passages meaning and further understand what the intended message is. Thought for thought translators, as the title suggest, aims more at capturing the meaning of the thought, than translating that into the new language. This can make for an easier read and possibly was the intent for such a style. You can start losing he ability to reference the original language as the effect wasn't so much to individual words as it was converying the same message. This could given the translator a bit too much weight in their translation as you are relying on their decision into what that orignal passage meant. Finally, there is the paraphrase. Which is by far the weakest of any translation style. This method can take large swaths of scripture and render the original language completely lost to the reader. It can "dumb down" or artifically "amp up" a piece of scripture depending on the author. This style, from my standpoint, should be completely avoided. Some claim it can be an easier read, but thought for thought translations are very readable already, the bar doesn't need to be lowered any further.