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Glitz58 t1_ix80fkf wrote

As you're well aware, are these are ancient texts of all sorts, collected together into

Old Testament ie anything to do with the Hebrew peoples, talking about themselves to themselves (over a fair range of time so ranging from pro having kings in Judges to blaming the kings for their problems later on!)

New Testament ie anything by Christian writers including 4 very varied biographies, a collection of memories of the early days after the death of Jesus (called Acts, possibly compiled for Paul's court case in Rome) and quite a bit of mail by different writers, some of which are FAQ eg 1 Corinthians , others to sort out arguments like Romans and 2 Corinthians) Revelation is most likely a coded letter, perfectly logical if you know both Old Testament prophets and Greek theatre. The word angel is untranslated Greek for messanger which everyone used before telephones.

As for version if you want the creepy joy feeling of undeciferable poesy go for KJV, if you want to be able to zap through the stories and make some sense of them read The Message.

The original NT Greek is a lower class version spoken by ordinary people and foreigners across the Roman Empire.

The level of the vocab of the original is about the level of The Sun. Only politically orientated translation has made it The Times complicated. The KJV deliberately used old fashioned language the same as Shakespeare did to impress and add drama.

They left some words in greekified versions because the word was day to day greek but a religious practice had been made out of it. Eg baptise is the word for plunge underwater as in dyeing (as in the final scene of Ever After, what the women are doing with the poles in the laundry room) or sailor talk for a submerged rock on the rocky Mediterranean coastlines. Angel as above. Tabernacle was Latin for a tent that nomadic people used as a meeting room.

The Message is quite colloquially American but means you can speed up the reading.

I found it helped to understand that the O T is variety of documents is like a collection of Baowolf, the Anglo Saxon Chronicals, the Pipe Rolls, and so on. Some is fiction or poetry and meant to be, some official or Minority Report Chronicals, warnings and more.

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Saxon2060 OP t1_ix81bsk wrote

I am mostly pretty aware of the stuff you mention but it hadn't really occurred to me that the "originals" were likely in totally vernacular or common speech and not especially poetic. I suppose that makes sense but I get the probably false impression that the prose was high-faluting because the KJV is in English... not really considering that they didn't write it in English, high-faluting or otherwise.

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Glitz58 t1_ix81uda wrote

The NT especially was written by second or third language speakers. I live in a second language country and see the language layers quite differently now. Paul's Greek was better than my French though.

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Glitz58 t1_ix82ch1 wrote

That 's why I went off fancy translations big way. And because I can't read it as a bunch of magic sayings, apart from the wisdom books it wasn' t written like that. We've played fast and loose with someone else's history. We'd go lary if people did that with our history. I think the OT at least should be judged on a similar level like hyroglyphics for example.

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Glitz58 t1_ix82uyt wrote

PS I don't get why someone down voted your post. I think it's common sense. I suppose someone is triggered about something. Once you know what to spot it's all over the place. Even in the Terry Pratchett Discworld Series that I like. Its part of our literary and cultural heritage.

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