Subnostr

(I would say the New King James, Modern English Version, and other Textus Receptus based revisions are fine, except that they’re copyrighted, and copyright is evil, but the NKJV actually does fix some poor Greek and use more standardized English theological terminology in the Pauline epistles that make understanding the references easier.)

Sweet 2y ago

This may sound retarded and like it doesn’t matter.

To be clear, right now, in the current year, the final product is basically the same. HOWEVER if you actually crack open the Nestle-Aland (current liberal text) and use the apparatus, you will see many cases where they’re straight up putting primary readings in the body that don’t exist in a single manuscript.

One day, someone is going to come along and “revolutionize” the field with yet another bogus miracle method for purifying the text, quite possibly using forgeries (which they already do in some cases) and little by little, they’re going to start chipping away at doctrines.

They’ve already commercialized the process. They tell you that you have to buy a new edition every few years, or you’ll never know what the Bible really says.

This is not how it works. The Bible does not change.

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Discussion

H 2y ago

I'm not against copyright per se, but I can't think of a framework that disincentivises this behaviour.

Sweet 2y ago

Owning Scripture is like owning rain water. It doesn’t make any sense.

I understand that they have to fund raise somehow to even get the projects off the ground, and it might even be a good excuse if we didn’t have a Bible.

The problem is, we do. We have tons of public domain Bibles, and you can quote them and repost them and do whatever you want with them, for free, without Nelson breathing down your neck.

The KJV is fine, and because the judgements of its committee are the basis for the final Textus Receptus revision, it’s comparable in importance to an actual Greek edition. It would actually save everyone time and effort if, instead of retranslating the entire thing every time, these publishers just made minor grammatical and terminology updates, which is all it really needs, and then released that without adding any additional copyright. We actually know this would work, because almost every Bible publisher already prints a version of the KJV unaltered, and it sells *better* than their proprietary versions that they spend decades on perfecting.

H 2y ago

Yeah, what I mean is copyright in general is fine because people have a right to be paid for their work (though I do have concerns about timeframes etc). I don't see a framework where religious texts can be excluded or protected from this kind of behaviour.