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RSV and NRSV

Discussion in '2004 Archive' started by DeclareHim, Jul 13, 2004.

  1. DeclareHim

    DeclareHim New Member

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    I was just curious about these version I am thinking of ordering the NRSV because a website has it for $6. What is some opinions on this BV and its revision. I know they must be used by catholics because many contain the apocrypha. The one I am thinking of purchasing doesn't contain it. How literal is the translation?
     
  2. Dr. Bob

    Dr. Bob Administrator
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    Personally would not waste money on either.

    Look at some key texts (like Is 7:14) and see what the RSV did to it. Brought the wrath of all conservative and evangelicals upon it!

    But the liturgical churches love it.
     
  3. go2church

    go2church Active Member
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    Both are good translations and worthy of owning. The Isaiah passage is always a hot one but I think the NRSV and the RSV got it right (search previous discussions on this board for reasions) it doesn't take away from the doctrine of the virgin birth by translating it correctly; young girl). Use the NRSV regularly and enjoy it, like the gender-accurate language attempt.
     
  4. DeclareHim

    DeclareHim New Member

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    What exacatly it liturgical church. thx go definetly going to purchase it and read it and study it with several other versions.
     
  5. Dr. Bob

    Dr. Bob Administrator
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    Liturgical church is one that follows the high church liturgy (hence the name) Laos = people, ergon = work. Certain aspects of formalism, ritual, creed, church calendar, etc in public worship.

    Think all Lutheran, all Catholic/Episcopal, all Eastern Orthodox, some Presbyterian, most Methodist, some Disciples of Christ/Christian church, very very few Baptists would fit that mold.
     
  6. DeclareHim

    DeclareHim New Member

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    Thanks for the answer Dr. Bob. Anybody else have an opinion on it.
     
  7. DeclareHim

    DeclareHim New Member

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    I'm not looking to extensivly use this version just going to look at it study it and kind of own a catholic Bible. Does anybody know about the New American Bible I think it's similar to the NRSV.
     
  8. Craigbythesea

    Craigbythesea Active Member

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    Our knowledge of New Testament Greek has vastly increased in the 20th century. The greatest increase in this knowledge grew out of the full realization that New Testament Greek is actually Koine Greek, the Greek used in everyday expression in the Roman world during the New Testament era. The discovery of a multitude of Greek papyri in Egypt, representing every kind of general literature--including letters between friends, business papers, court records, government documents, etc.--have been of great value in improving our knowledge of the vocabulary of the Greek New Testament.

    The translators of the Revised Standard Version New Testament had much of this knowledge available to them and utilized it in preparing their translation which was first published in 1946. In 1952, when the complete Revised Standard Version of the Bible was first published, the New Testament was revised in eighty places. In 1962 about two hundred additional revisions were made. A second edition of the New Testament was published in 1971. Some of these changes were based upon reconsiderations made upon evaluating criticisms and some were based upon continuing New Testament scholarship.

    In 1990 the New Revised Standard Version was first published. Since it is a major revision, and the Revised Standard Version is still widely used, I will confine the rest of this post to the Revised Standard Version.

    An important consequence of the increase in our knowledge of New Testament Greek was that a departure was made in the Revised Standard Version from the traditional interpretations of certain words and phrases. Some of these departures are brought to the attention of the reader in the notes accompanying the text, others are not.

    Some of these departures have been the cause of much criticism from conservative evangelicals. A good example of such a departure is the deletion of "begotten" from the phrase, "only begotten Son," found in the King James Version in John 3:16. This deletion has received much criticism even though the King James Version translated the same Greek word "only," rather than "only begotten," in Luke 7:12, 8:42, and 9:38.

    The language used in the Revised Standard Version is contemporary, replacing archaic renderings with current ones. The translation as a whole is less literal than the American Standard Version or New American Standard Bible, but much more literal than the Good News Bible, New English Bible, or Jerusalem Bible. Contrary to the charge by some extremists, The Revised Standard Version is not part of a communist plot to infiltrate the Bible. It is a fine translation produced by nine of the most able Biblical scholars of all time:

    Prof. Walter Russell Bowie, Union Theological Seminary
    Prof. Millar Burrows, Yale University
    Prof. Henry J. Cadbury, Harvard University
    Prof. Clarence T. Craig, Oberlin Graduate School of Theology
    Prof. Edgar J. Goodspeed, University of Chicago
    Prof. Frederick C. Grant, Union Theological Seminary
    Prof. James Moffatt, Union Theological Seminary
    Dean Luther A. Weigle, Yale University Divinity School, Chairman
    Pres. Abdel Ross Wentz, Lutheran Theological Seminary
     
  9. Craigbythesea

    Craigbythesea Active Member

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    DeclareHim,

    The NAB, with the 1986 edition of the New Testament, is, in my opinion a good translation of the Bible, but I do not care for the gender-inclusive language. Not everyone, however, agrees with my point of view, including many Catholics. I am enclosing here for your consideration a review of the NAB from “Bible Research.”

    The New American Bible

    Louis F. Hartman and Myles M. Bourke, eds., The New American Bible, Translated from the Original Languages, with Critical Use of All the Ancient Sources, by Members of the Catholic Biblical Association of America. Sponsored by the Bishops' Committee of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press. 1970.

    The history of this Roman Catholic version is rather complicated. It was undertaken with the support and oversight of the American hierarchy after Pope Pius XII in 1943 issued an encyclical letter (the Divino afflante Spiritu) in which he encouraged Roman Catholic scholars to make translations of the Bible from the original languages rather than from the Latin Vulgate, which previously had been the basic text used by Catholic translators. At that time a new translation from the Vulgate, called the Confraternity Version, was already underway in America, the New Testament having been published in 1941. The corresponding translation of the Latin Old Testament was abandoned after the Pope's encyclical gave permission to translate from the Hebrew, and work began on a translation of the Hebrew, with Louis F. Hartman as the chief editor. This translation of the Old Testament gradually appeared in four volumes in 1951, l955, 1961, and 1969. Work on a new translation of the Greek New Testament (based on the Nestle-Aland 25th edition) began in 1956, with Myles M. Bourke as the chief editor. The completed Bible, as published in 1970, contained a substantial revision of the Old Testament portions which had earlier been published. The 1970 version of Genesis was an entirely new translation. Shortly after the publication of the complete Bible, the American bishops decided that the 1970 NAB New Testament was too paraphrastic for general use, (1) and so the New Testament was "revised" (translated anew, really, on different principles, from the 26th edition of Nestle-Aland) and published in 1986. This new translation of the New Testament was for the most part more literal, but it employed "dynamic equivalence" in places for the sake of gender-neutral language. The Book of Psalms was similarly "revised" in 1991. Therefore, the most recent editions of the NAB include the 1970 Old Testament, 1991 Psalter, and 1986 New Testament, though some older editions are still in print. A revision of the entire Old Testament, excluding the Psalter, is currently underway, and this is expected to be published in 2003.

    Pope John Paul II and other Vatican officials were not happy with this version, mainly because of the inclusive language, which was mandated by liturgical guidelines issued by a committee of the U.S. Catholic Conference in 1990 (2) but specifically disallowed by the provisional norms for translation of biblical texts sent by Vatican officials to American Bishops in June of 1997, (3) and also disallowed by the translation guidelines formally promulgated in an Instruction published by the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in March 2001. (4) And so, although the NAB is the "official" translation of the U.S. Conference of Bishops, it became necessary for the Scripture portions included in the liturgy of the English Mass to be revised. A complete overhaul so as to remove the inclusive language from the version, in accordance with the liturgical guidelines of the Vatican, would seem to be the next logical step; but this is unlikely to happen because opposition to the Vatican guidelines is very strong in the American hierarchy. Richard John Neuhaus described the confused state of affairs surrounding Roman Catholic Bible versions in 2001:

    literature
    • James Barr, "After five years: a retrospect on two major translations of the Bible," in Heythrop Journal 15 (October 1974), 381-405.
    • Edward P. Arbez, "The New Catholic Translation of the Old Testament," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 14 (July 1952): 237-54.
    • T.H. Stahel, "A Conversation with Scripture Scholar Myles M. Bourke." America. 168/13 (1993), 4-9.
    • Claude J. Peifer, review in Worship 45 (February 1971), 102-13.
    • Gerard S. Sloyan, review in Living Light 7 (Fall 1970), 87-104.
    • L. Sabourin, review in Biblical Theology Bulletin 2 (July 1972), 206-8.
    • Keith R. Crim, review in Interpretation 26 (January 1972), 77-80.
    • Robert L. Alden, review in Westminster Theological Journal 34 (May 1972), 217.
    • Bruce M. Metzger, review in The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 64 (March 1971), 90-99.
    • Frederick W. Danker, review in Catholic Biblical Quarterly 33 (July 1971), 405-9.
    • John Reumann, review in Journal of Biblical Literature 92 (July 1973), 275-78.
    • Frank Stagg, review in Review and Expositor 68 (Summer 1971), 400-2.

    1. Francis T. Gignac, S.J., who was chairman of the board of editors for the revision of the New Testament, explains, "The [1970] translation was one of dynamic rather than formal equivalence. Dynamic equivalence attempts to express the thought of the original in a linguistic structure suited to the target language, even though this structure may differ greatly from the corresponding Greek structure. While it often results in fresh renderings, it has the strong disadvantage of causing a more or less radical abandonment of traditional terminology and phraseology; further, it tends to degenerate into paraphrase and leads to expansions of the text to include what more properly belongs in notes or commentaries." (The Revision of the New Testament of the New American Bible).
    2.Published as "Criteria for the Evaluation of Inclusive Language" in Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy Newsletter 26 (October/November 1990), p. 231.
    3. See "Vatican Translation Norms Reject 'Inclusive Language'," Adoremus Bulletin, July/August 1997.
    4. Liturgiam Authenticam. On the Use of Vernacular Languages in the Publication of the Books of the Roman Liturgy. Vatican, 2001.
    5. "Bible Babel," First Things 113 (May 2001), p. 67.
     
  10. RaptureReady

    RaptureReady New Member

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    Amen Dr. Bob. I would not waste my money on them either. What's funny to me is, you would not waste your money on them, but other modernist will. Seems like there is no standard among us guys. Could you imagine buying all the versions out there :eek: , it would get expensive, very expensive. That's one reason why I believe in one Bible.
     
  11. robycop3

    robycop3 Well-Known Member
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    I believe in one Bible, several versions.
     
  12. Pete Richert

    Pete Richert New Member

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    You must understand, the RSV was in the process of being purified seven times into God's Holy Word. First was the RSV (1952) then
    (2)RSV (1974)
    (3)ESV Paper Back (2001)
    (4)ESV Pew Bible (2001)
    (5)ESV Leather Edition (2001)
    (6)ESV Classic Reference (2001)
    (7)ESV Thinline (2001): God's purified and perfect word (Psalm 12:5-7!)
     
  13. DeclareHim

    DeclareHim New Member

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    Thanks for the answers Craig very informative. Glad to know that their fairly accurate translation.
     
  14. Michael52

    Michael52 Member

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    What will we do when the HCSB gets purified the 7th time? That will be a dilema. ;)
     
  15. Michael52

    Michael52 Member

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    DeclareHim

    I got the NRSV several years ago and have read most of it. In most places it matches fairly closely other formally-equivalent MV's, with some innovative readings in some places. The gender-inclusive parts are "strange", however (ie unnecessary).

    I mainly got it so I could read the apocrypha in a modern tranlsation.
     
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