I’m late to the party, but if cost/availability of the Oxford is a problem, consider the Harper Collins annotated NRSV. I used it for several religion classes and found that the notes were helpful, even if some of them were redundant.
Oh, and does anyone keep reading that passage from Ruth as being about Ruth and Oprah?
I thought you were LDS, not JW, dougie. You’ll note that I mentioned the Jos. Smith Jr. translation distinctly from that comment. I agree with your comments re: the Living Bible, which is in fact a paraphrase intended to make the Scriptures clear to the evangelical Protestants who are its intended readership. I’m not familiar with the Douay (or Douay/Confraternity) but find that the Catholic “slant” in the modern Catholic translations (NAB, NJB, etc.) is in the footnotes, not in the text, which is as accurately rendered as most other scholarly translations.
Try the second chapter of Phillippians in the Jerusalem Bible.
Moderate derail, apologies.
If I remember my Oprah history correctly, her parents INTENDED to name her after the Biblical character Orpah, but misspelled her name on the birth certificate.
At any rate, the similarity isn’t coincidental!
Why? First you claimed that there was a Catholic bias in the *Douai-Rheims * version, but only came up with its (admittedly) stilited language. (Hardly a theological bias, in itself.) Now you make a cryptic reference to the Jerusalem Bible without indicating any bias there, either.
The JB was a private effort in which numerous individuals (generally Catholic) collaborated and which has received both the Nihil Obstat and an Imprimatur from various Catholic diocese. It is not an “official” Catholic work that was created to proselytize Catholic belief. The individual who translated Phillipians chose to emphasize the poetic constructions in the original when he translated it to English. This is something that several of the translators made an effort to accomplish. (Most of the translators attempted to do the same thing for the long sections of poetry found in the prophets.)
So, aside from a general dislike of the translation (to which you are certainly entitled), what particular Catholic bias do you find in the JB translation of Phillipians?
The bias I find is in the effort of the translator(s) to imbue Jesus with the same status as God the Father. Read an interlinear translation of Phillippians 2:5-8 and compare it with that passage in the *Jerusalem Bible–*or any other Catholic translation, for that matter. And note that Paul concludes this passage with “…that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.”
Besides, in the Gospel of John, Jesus was discussing the Holy Spirit. In Greek the word for “spirit” is pneuma, a neuter noun. Again, using an interlinear translation, you can see where the Douay (and the KJV for that matter) hide the fact that it’s a neuter noun, by using personal pronouns; John 14:7 is an example.
Moved to GD.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
Very interesting debate.
I wonder how people got on for centuries,with only a few passages read to them over the years, it must have been explained to them by the reader,priest or teacher. No wonder there is still debate going on today. No wonder there is confusion.
Monavis
I (protestant girl with plenty of my own anti-Catholic bias) can’t see what on earth you’re talking about - even when reading it next to my own NRSV interlinear.
NRSV:
Jerusalem Bible
Greek
If dougie is JW, I know exactly what he means by Phillipians 2 but it’s not a “Catholic” bias but a “Trinitarian” (or at least “Duotarian/Binitarian/Dyatarian”?
one)-
the traditional interpretation is that Jesus shared in God’s Nature but didn’t cling to It, instead putting His Deity on hold to incarnate as a human
the JW/Arian/classical Unitarian position- Jesus was created as God’s Image (either before all Creation or at his conception by Mary) but didn’t make a grab
for Divinity, as did Lucifer & Adam, but humbled himself to be God’s servant & humanity’s savior.
I do hold to the Trinity & the Deity of Christ, but I understand the Unitarian position.
To the OP- I use the New KJV usually- I think the Textus Receptus is the Scripture as fully developed in the Church & the NKJV corrects the mistranslations & archaisms while preserving the rhythm of the language.
BUT I do greatly like the (New) Jerusalem Bible (TJB was the original & it was revised as TNJB), the Harper Collins Study NRSV, the 1901 American Standard Version, and for some good insights Everett Fox’s The Five Books of Moses and the Catholic translation of the Bible by Msgr. Ronald Knox (out of print alas).
:o
So it wasn’t the *Jerusalem Bible * I was referring to–it was the Confraternity New Testament (paired with the Douay Old Testament until the OT in the Confraternity translation was available).
In that version it says Jesus was “by nature God,”
The Greek phrase here is en morphei theou.
Word for word that’s “in form god (genitive).” “Form,” morphe, is properly rendered here in the dative case.
Jesus used a similar construction in John 10:36, quoting from Psalm 82:6 which in the King James version reads “I said, Ye are gods.”
Paul is indeed presenting this issue of Jesus’ divine nature–it’s necessary to the thrust of Paul’s argument. He exhorts the Philippians to have a mental state of humility, and says, in a manner of speaking, If it was good enough for Jesus it should be good enough for you. The effort to represent Jesus as a “God the Son” equal to God the Father is irrelevant to Paul’s point.
I will grant that the translation in the Douai and Confraternity editions is odd.
In what way is that a “Catholic bias”? In fact, the footnote in the Confraternity edition that accompanies that verse explicitly says
Since “the Latin” would clearly indicate the Vulgate which was the official version held by the Catholic Church for many years, I see no “Catholic bias” in the translation, merely a poor choice of expression.
Considering that the overwhelming majority of Christians of almost all denominations profess Trinitarianism, I would say that this is your problem, dougie, and not that of the translators.
“Overwhelming majority”? Not my problem, Polycarp. I’ve never considered this the kind of thing to be put to a vote. I prefer quality to quantity.