Glory to Jesus Christ!

Hello everyone! I was checking out the Orthodox Study Bible on Amazon and I'm confused about something. I have heard criticisms of the KJV translation of the Bible, so why is the NT a KJV translation and not an Orthodox translation? I mean the Catholic Church has it's own translations. Why is there not a truly Orthodox translation?

If there is what is it called? What would you guys use as the best Bible for Orthodox study?

Kyrie eleison,

Manuel

The Orthodox Study Bible has the NKJV New Testament and is published by a Protestant publishing house and distributed by Conciliar Press. The project was driven by Evangelical converts to Orthodoxy, who run Conciliar Press, and my impression is that they carried a fondness for the KJV, NKJV Bible with them into Orthodoxy. The project, as it was carried out, continues to puzzle me.

With all the great minds at Holy Cross, St. Vladimir's, Holy Trinity and other Orthodox seminaries and academic institutions, there is definitely enough "brain power" to produce a fully authentic English-language Orthodox translation of the Sacred Scriptures. I am not sure why that has never been done.

Because, push come to shove, a good translator is humble enough to rely on those who have gone before him. The NKJV translation in the OSB has been amended where necessary to bring it eliminate a few tendentious passages, but 99+% of it was perfectly acceptable as it was. Why reinvent the wheel (those who think they can make a better wheel need only look at the funny looking tires on the RDL). They did produce their own translation of the LXX Old Testament, which is quite good in its own right.

God doesn't really care about the affiliation of the translator--He's more interested in whether the translator is competent. God, for instance, is not happy at all with the New American Bible, for all that it was published by the Catholic Church. And there are plenty of really lousy Orthodox translations, both of Scripture and Liturgy, which God also doesn't like very much. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure He's happy with the OSB.

That's mighty proud of you to assume what God does and does not like.

I don't disagree that there are plenty of awful translations out there, and the NAB certainly leaps to the front of the list, I just find the OSB project confusing. Perhaps it is silly of me to expect something like a pan-Orthodox English language project on the Scriptures.

Arguments against re-inventing the wheel make perfect sense, but Orthodoxy seems (to me) to have a built in disdain for anything coming from outside Orthodoxy and I would have expected an unequivocally Orthodox translation project to have been completed long before now.

Translating the Scriptures is a less daunting task that many make it out to be. Msgr. Ronald Knox did a pretty darn good job, all by himself, about 50 years ago. He was certainly an accomplished academic, but he was just one man.

It took many years for the wonderful notes and commentary; if they started from scratch there would still be nothing published. For at least 95 percent of laypeople, the NKJV is just fine. It has become my primary source for scripture.

Tried it, have you?



He also borrowed heavily from existing translations.

I translated the Gospel of John in college, but that is beside the point.

The point is/was all about a pan-Orthodox effort, but forget it.

Greetings,

Certainly the OSB Old Testament offers the only published English translation of Rhalf's LXX I know of. Since Rhalf's has for many years been the scholarly standard LXX, the OSB Old Testament is useful to me. I couldn't care less about the ecclesiastical views of its translators.

As one utterly convinced of the Byzantine Majority GNT, I'm not really a fan of the NKJV. But that is another discussion altogether.

συστρατιωτης

It was a Pan-Orthodox effort. They just didn't do it the way you wanted.

I would tend to disagree with that.

The text for the New Testament in the Authorized Version (i.e. KJV) of the Bible is seen as adhering closest to the Byzantine text itself, and therefore has been the preferred English language translation.

Aside from that, I think the English-speaking world needs just one Bible, and of all the different translations, the KJV comes closest to being that, having shaped and informed the English language for the past four hundred-odd years. We need it as a source of cultural unity, as well as to provide us all with a common frame of reference when we speak of God, so that we can all understand each other.

I think the KJV would make a terrible scripture for unity of english speaking people. It was created by King james in 1620 for political reasons when he was putting forth his ideas of the divine right of the monarchy as paralleling the power and rights of divinity.

it's not even a translation from the original, but is a translation from the latin.

What???? Can you point out how it is tilted towards putting forth the idea of divine right? He did tell the translators not to introduce some of the translational bias that had come in through other texts that were products of the Reformation. That actually makes it *more* suitable to use.

It was also not translated from Latin, but from Greek and Hebrew.

The King James Version was first published in AD 1611. It was a reactionary version created to compete with the Reformer's "Geneva Bible" which contained a commentary quite critical of monarchies in general and the Latin Church in particular.

King James was very anxious to have the new version completed, so that he placed a short timeline on his "translators". The Anglican Church was quite happy with their Bishop's Bible of 1568, so the KJV translators essentially "edited" that one to produce the 1611 version in time for King James. Large portions of the KJV are in fact the work of William Tyndale not the 1611 "translators".

I think we can thank God for what the Reformers and James got us. Before those translations, layman could not personally own a Bible. The scriptures were the property of the Church and read in the churches.

With the Geneva, mass printings and wide distrubution became available by 1615 so that the Puritains carried copies with them to the New World on the Mayflower. Eventually the KJV was also mass published to compete. The result is today anybody in a free society can own a Bible and read it at will.

We wouldn't even be having this discussion if not for those awful Reformers in Geneva.

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