Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Rush_shirt
Apr 24, 2007

(Disclaimer: I identify as Christian.)

For literary readings, I would recommend The Third Millenium Bible. This is essentially the 1611 Authorized King James Version (AKJV) with Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books. It preserves the lofty Biblical English of the King James while updating certain archaic words to modern equivalents (for example, it updates murrain to pestilence). The official website has excerpts and explanations for translation decisions.

For academic studies, I would recommend The Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha (NRSV). It's chock full of scholarly commentary and maps, and it's pretty affordable to boot.

If you know how to read foreign languages (or are willing to learn), I would recommend the following:

Greek: The Septuagint with Apocrypha by Brenton. The Septuagint is significantly older than the Masoretic text (which doesn't necessarily mean that it's more accurate) on which most English translations is based. English translation is included on the margins.

Hebrew: A Reader's Hebrew Bible by Brown and Smith. The Masoretic text with English vocabulary in the footnotes. Please note that this is put out by a Christian company; if you're looking for the Hebrew Bible from a Jewish company, check out Tanach: Stone Edition from ArtScroll, which places the Hebrew and English on opposite pages and features some solid rabbinical commentary.


EDIT: I should also mention that Stephen Mitchell has an excellent translation of The Book of Job. I really enjoyed his Gilgamesh translation, so I was excited to find out he did this.

Which brings up the question: Where does one start with The Bible?

First, let's divide the Bible into several section:

Hebrew Bible (TaNaKh)/Old Testament
Torah (Teachings): The Pentateuch (Five Books of Moses)
Novim (Prophets): Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc.
Ketuvim (Writings): Job, Proverbs, Kings, etc.

Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical Books

New Testament
The Gospels (3 Synoptic + John)
Book of Acts
Pauline Epistles
Other Writings (including Revelation)

Back to the question, it really depends on your intentions and your religious background. I'll assume that most goons in this thread intend to read the Bible for literary and/or scholarly purposes, and that they are not religious.

With that assumption, I would recommend the following order of books:
  1. Genesis and Exodus. Skip the rest of the Pentateuch for now, unless you're interested in Old Testament Law.
  2. Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings. These contain important histories (although their scholarly merit is always up for debate) and classic stories.
  3. Job. This one is pretty definitive and attempts to answer the age-old question of why good people suffer.
  4. Psalms. I recommend reading these throughout your studies and constantly returning to them. Even if not used for prayer, they are beautifully composed.
  5. Proverbs and/or Ecclesiastes. Wisdom literature for the ages, although I'm sure some would take issue with certain teachings.
  6. Song of Songs. Often hailed as the most erotic book in the Bible, it likens God's love for Israel to the erotic love found in youth.
  7. Isaiah and/or Jeremiah and/or Ezekiel. These are the major prophets.
  8. Daniel. For those who care for mystical imagery (this book is referenced heavily in Revelation).
  9. Jonah. The "minor" prophets are fairly short, but I recommend this one in particular if only because the story of Jonah and the whale is pretty well known.
  10. The Gospels. Mark is the most straight-forward, John is the most mystical. They each bring something different to the table, and reading along with scholarly commentary helps you appreciate he differences.
  11. Acts. One of the earliest Christian histories, includes the story of Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul).
  12. Romans and Hebrews. These are some of the heaviest hitting Pauline epistles, so make sure you have commentary handy. Still, with a good grounding in the Old Testament, you should be able to handle these two books.
  13. 1, 2, & 3 John, and Revelation. Johannine literature, ending with the book that most people should probably not read in their first month of being religious.

I am by no means a biblical expert, so please feel free to disagree. The above order is just what I'd recommend to non-religious goons.

Rush_shirt fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Nov 3, 2014

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Eric the Mauve
May 8, 2012

Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Rush_shirt posted:


[*]Job. This one is pretty definitive and attempts to answer the age-old question of why good people suffer.

Granted that neither the answer God gave Job ("Because I'm God and I said so") nor the actual answer (Because God and Satan had a bet) is very satisfying to most folks.

That said, the very few Hebrew scholars I've met have told me Job is one of the most beautiful things ever written, and though the KJV translation takes an admirable stab at it it's impossible to really translate the poetry.

Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Nov 1, 2014

Rush_shirt
Apr 24, 2007

Eric the Mauve posted:

That said, the very few Hebrew scholars I've met have told me Job is one of the most beautiful things ever written, and though the KJV translation takes an admirable stab at it it's impossible to really translate the poetry.

That is why I would recommend the Mitchell translation. However, it's true that at least some of the awe will always be lost in translation.

Malaleb
Dec 1, 2008

Eric the Mauve posted:

Granted that neither the answer God gave Job ("Because I'm God and I said so") nor the actual answer (Because God and Satan had a bet) is very satisfying to most folks.

That said, the very few Hebrew scholars I've met have told me Job is one of the most beautiful things ever written, and though the KJV translation takes an admirable stab at it it's impossible to really translate the poetry.

I think the more interesting message to take away from Job is that you can't figure out why bad things happen to good people and those that assume they know (Job's friends) are full of it. It fits well with the message of Ecclesiastes.

amuayse
Jul 20, 2013

by exmarx
Question: I've been trying to get a real answer for this and I've been reading into it, but can God himself give faith to someone? Or is it beyond his control?

Some Pinko Commie
Jun 9, 2009

CNC! Easy as 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣!

amuayse posted:

Question: I've been trying to get a real answer for this and I've been reading into it, but can God himself give faith to someone? Or is it beyond his control?

Romans 12:3 seems to indicate that the amount of faith you have is totally under God's control, and you cannot influence it at all.

quote:

For I say to every man that is among you, through the grace given unto me, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.

semihippie
Jul 28, 2004
The Wanderer
Jonah

Jonah is awesome. Here is why.

Most scholars today say that the book of Jonah is a satire of other prophetic writings. While the other prophets cry and lament, and urge Israel to change and reconsider their ways for chapters and chapters, Jonah is much more psychological, and frankly about how much Jonah doesn't get the whole prophet thing. Jonah, is the most reluctant of prophets, and is not a particularly great person, even attempting to escape to the ends of the earth (Spain) in order to get out of going to Nineveh. Once he gets there, you can practically hear him not being really into the whole prophet thing. You can imagine Jonah mumbling aloud his prophecy, ready to give up the city to destruction, when instead, the entire city of Ninevah repents. Jonah is flabbergasted and angry at the fact that God is saving the city of Ninevah, doing the whole melodramatic teenager thing-"it is better for me to live than die" and God decides to teach him another lesson.

Jonah travels through the desert, God makes a small bush appear to give Jonah shade. During the night, God kills the tree with a worm, and the next day, God summons up a great east wind that makes Jonah once again say, "it is better for me to live then die."

God then lays a verbal smackdown on Jonah-(Jonah 4:8-11) "But God said to Jonah, “ Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the LORD said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
I've always felt Moses to be the most reluctant. He refuses to do anything god wants and then eventually lets his brother do everything.

Eric the Mauve
May 8, 2012

Making you happy for a buck since 199X
Gideon (Book of Judges) is another guy who responded to The Call with, "I don't really want to do this. Do I have to do this?"

Rush_shirt
Apr 24, 2007

amuayse posted:

Question: I've been trying to get a real answer for this and I've been reading into it, but can God himself give faith to someone? Or is it beyond his control?

This question goes beyond the scope of biblical studies, and varies by faith tradition.

Bob Nudd
Jul 24, 2007

Gee whiz doc!
Whatever about translation, the Bible I find most readable is this one: http://www.biblica.com/en-us/the-books-of-the-bible/

Simply because it's typeset so that each constituent book is presented as an individual work to be read on its own terms. This makes it so much more readable than the typical dense, mulci-column word block festooned with chapter and verse numbers, footnotes, cross-references and all that apparatus. Just a nice clean collection of ancient texts ready for your perusal. My only complaint is the tissue-thin paper used in my complete edition; the multi-volume approach looks more readable.

BrainDance
May 8, 2007

Disco all night long!

Hi everybody

I was looking for a specific Bible thread. I came here looking for it and went through all the other posts that were linked in it but none of them were what I was looking for. I posted in ask/tell's small questions megathread but I don't think that was really the best place. Hoping maybe someone here could help me out. Here's what I posted in ask/tell

BrainDance posted:

A while ago, but probably not too long ago there was an Ask/Tell (??) thread about The Bible and Biblical scholarship. It was not written by a religious person I think, but more of a historian or something? It had a ton of details on the Bible, the history of the Bible and the people and groups involved in it.

I had found it many times in the past, but now suddenly I can't find it anymore. Maybe it was archived. I have archives, but you know, archives search. I tried the one archive search made by the creepy guy but I couldn't find anything and that thing is half broken anyway. Can anyone help me find it?

I know it is NOT the book barn Bible thread.

It is also none of these threads
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=1557016
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=1560222
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3297733
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3381676

Thanks in advance.

Any ideas? It was a really big, detailed thread. I think I bookmarked it before on SA but I think it got pushed back into archives. Should have actually bookmarked it in my browser :/

Sally
Jan 9, 2007


Don't post Small Dash!
All I now is that this thread shout really be renamed to "The Bible - The Alpha And Omegathread

Blurred
Aug 26, 2004

WELL I WONNER WHAT IT'S LIIIIIKE TO BE A GOOD POSTER

BrainDance posted:

Hi everybody

I was looking for a specific Bible thread. I came here looking for it and went through all the other posts that were linked in it but none of them were what I was looking for. I posted in ask/tell's small questions megathread but I don't think that was really the best place. Hoping maybe someone here could help me out. Here's what I posted in ask/tell


Any ideas? It was a really big, detailed thread. I think I bookmarked it before on SA but I think it got pushed back into archives. Should have actually bookmarked it in my browser :/

Jesus Christ I've made a lot of Bible threads. :stare:

This is the most recent one I made and the only one you didn't post there - is this it?

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3556458

BrainDance
May 8, 2007

Disco all night long!

Blurred posted:

Jesus Christ I've made a lot of Bible threads. :stare:

This is the most recent one I made and the only one you didn't post there - is this it?

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3556458

That is exactly it! Thank you so much, not just for linking it but for the thread itself. There's so much detail there that it really inspired me to read more about the history and to start reading the Bible.

Barlow
Nov 26, 2007
Write, speak, avenge, for ancient sufferings feel
Anyone have any idea how the English Standard Version is as a translation? I noticed that there was a "readers edition" which had verse numbers removed, which is something I really like in a Bible and I was tempted to get it.

Barlow fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Jan 27, 2015

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Tell me about the difference in theology between the synoptic gospels and John. John in the gnostic-y one, right? How do they differ in the treatment of the Jewish law?

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Mar 7, 2015

Blurred
Aug 26, 2004

WELL I WONNER WHAT IT'S LIIIIIKE TO BE A GOOD POSTER

icantfindaname posted:

Tell me about the difference in theology between the synoptic gospels and John.

It's not easy to do this topic justice in a short post, but I'll do my best.

Two important things to always consider when reading John: firstly, and most obviously, it doesn't share a direct textual relationship with the first three gospels. It is suspected that John might have known about the Gospel of Mark, and perhaps the Gospel of Luke, but it's also clear - from the overwhelming differences in language used - that the author of John did not make direct use of any of these gospels in the composition of his own work. Some scholars believe that John may have drawn from other sources, but I'd say the unity of the text makes this rather unlikely. John is best read as a self-contained work, and I think that the scholarship that has tried to understand it by comparing it to the other gospels and their related traditions has proven rather fruitless.

Secondly, following from the first, my take on the gospel (based on scattered references throughout the gospel and also the Johannine epistles - 1-3 John) is that it was written by a member of a rather isolated Christian community, that had occasionally strained relationships with other Christian communities. From this we can probably infer that the gospel represents a theology that was unique to this community (perhaps founded by the "beloved disciple" that the text makes regular reference to) and that we shouldn't presume that it represents a theology that was at all normative for Christians at that time (~90-100 CE). There are major theological differences between the gospels / epistles of John and other NT works, and these theological idiosyncrasies can probably be seen as a consequence of the isolated nature of John's community, to say nothing of the fact that there was not - as yet - any such thing as "orthodox" Christian beliefs.

The most major theological difference between John and the synoptic gospels, for me, is linked to it's "soteriology" - that is, the study of how we are to be saved. The Jesus of the synoptic gospels often speaks with a very strong moralistic tone, and is constantly informing us that salvation is at least partly dependent on "repentance" (metanoia) - that one should in some very fundamental way change who one is, and to start acting accordingly. For Jesus, this involved not merely returning to the letter of the old Jewish Law, but to go beyond it. One should not merely avoid adultery, for example, one should not even think about it. One should not merely love one's neighbour, one should also love one's enemies. In John, these kind of moral duties are almost completely absent. Instead, one is called to "believe" (pisteuo) in Christ, or to "come" to him, or to "follow" him - repentance in the form of deed is replaced by a more intellectual, or sophistic kind of repentance. Social duties (for example, to the poor) are largely absent from the Gospel of John. One is instead saved through a kind of spiritual communion with Christ, a position more akin to that of Paul and to the later gnostic Christians than to the synoptic gospels.

This is related to another major difference between John and the synoptic gospels (and also between John and Paul, in this case) relating to the place of "eschatology". Eschatology is the study of the "end-times", what we would more commonly (but wrongly) refer to today as "armageddon" or "the apocalypse". For the synoptic Jesus, for Paul and for John the Baptist, the notion of salvation was intimately tied up with the coming eschaton, with the future time at which the "Kingdom of God" would be instituted here on Earth. For all of these individuals, entry into the Kingdom of God required the performance of fairly strict rules, including the ones we mentioned above. For each of Jesus, Paul and JtB, individual salvation was collectively bound up with the coming end-times, and it was this belief that gave Christianity its early urgency and which can be found throughout most of the texts of the NT (especially the earlier ones). In John, eschatology has mostly been forced into the background. The phrase "the Kingdom of God'" is almost completely absent, replaced with phrases like "eternal life". The other implication is that the salvation of believers has already been realised, rather than something to come in the indefinite future.

There are other differences, of course, but these are the major ones for me.

quote:

John in the gnostic-y one, right?

Kind of, but we have to be a little bit careful with using that term.

A lot of scholars (particularly in the past, less so now) liked to use the word "gnostic" for any kind of belief they had categorising into known belief systems, and which seemed somehow at odds with orthodoxy. The gnostics, though, believed quite specific things that are not to be found for the most part in the NT texts, for the simple reason that it didn't really emerge as a distinct and coherent belief system until after the NT texts had been written. There are, however, moments where we can identify "proto-gnostic" beliefs in NT texts, particularly in John and the letters of Paul.

The most obvious is the kind of language used. The gnostics - like John - really enjoyed employing binary categories like "dark and light", "truth and falsity", "life and death" and so on. This is also a common theme in John's gospel. It does, however, also tend to be a common theme in many other world religions (Levi-Strauss identified such dualities as being common to nearly all religious traditions, for examples), so we shouldn't get too carried away with the correspondence in language here.

Next, the "Christology" of John (that is, the study of who people believed Jesus to be) shares some important similarities with gnosticism, but some important differences as well. The similarities would be that both John and the gnostics identified Jesus with the role of cosmic saviour, and one who was "pre-existent" in heaven prior to his Earthly ministry. We would say, then, that both John and the gnostics had "high" Christologies. John, however, was quite emphatic on the point that Jesus was a physically human being, both before and after resurrection (hence the wound fingering in the "doubting Thomas" story), whereas gnostics would often (but not always) tend towards "docetistic" beliefs - that is, the belief that Jesus wasn't really a human being, just one who appeared to be so. As for soteriology, as I've mentioned John believed that heaven wasn't something that could be secured by action or by repentance, but rather through belief. The gnostics, similarly, believed that salvation could only be achieved through knowledge, namely the knowledge of hidden things. Both John and the gnostics believed that would could commune directly with the risen saviour Christ by such means. So they both react against the soteriology of the synoptic gospels, but in a slightly different way.

Overall, though, we should be hesitant about likening the Gospel of John to gnosticism because the latter came many decades after the former. We can identify similar themes and language in John and the gospels, but it would be anachronistic to say John was anticipating gnosticism in any way. Similarly, we could say that there are "proto-Protestant" themes in Paul, so long as we can recognise that Paul would have rejected as much of Protestantism and he would have accepted.

I'll come back to the question of Jewish law when I have time a bit later.

Blurred fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Mar 10, 2015

BrainDance
May 8, 2007

Disco all night long!

Blurred I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your bible posts. Everything I've read that you've written has ended up answering questions I did t even know to ask.

I mostly started reading the bible to make my girlfriend happy, to be honest. But because of your posts, I'm genuinely interested in it myself.

Where can I find other resources to study the... I don't know how to put it... History, context and logic of the bible(??) instead of more uhhh... Religious stuff? I know that's not the best way to put it but hopefully you get what I mean.

Rush_shirt
Apr 24, 2007

BrainDance posted:

Where can I find other resources to study the... I don't know how to put it... History, context and logic of the bible(??) instead of more uhhh... Religious stuff? I know that's not the best way to put it but hopefully you get what I mean.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible has great scholarly footnotes and articles. I would just use that as your primary Bible.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

GAINING WEIGHT...
Mar 26, 2007

See? Science proves the JewsMuslims are inferior and must be purged! I'm not a racist, honest!
Wow, this thread could really just be Blurred posting big fancy walls-o-text and that'd be just fine.

Few questions for you, or anyone who cares to answer. First, why are the "other" gospels (Thomas, Peter, Mary, Judas) universally dismissed? Is it just bias from the decisions made at the Council of Nicaea, or are there real historiographical reasons that they aren't worth our time? I've heard they can be ignored because they "came so much later, in the second century" which on its face sounds like powerful evidence against them, but then you have to remember...100 AD is technically the second century, and that's not long at all after John.

Also, do you think we can see evidence of exaggeration of the Jesus story through the four canonical gospels, in chronological order? Mark is pretty tame, ending with an empty tomb and nothing more, and by the time we get to John it's two angels at the tomb and Jesus appearing to the twelve and doubting Thomas and the two men on the road to Jerusalem and all the rest. Not to mention that John is the only gospel with flat out claims from the mouth of Jesus to being an incarnation of God (according to some interpretations).

A very interesting thread!

  • Locked thread