What a Scholar Would Not Do

I’ve had some interesting correspondences with you guys and thought I’d show you one, with the permission of ‘Mary’. I’ll pare it down just a little bit.

Hi Allan,

I’ve attached photos from a family bible in my possession that may be useful for your current research. My husband’s grandparents, who were born in the late 1800’s’ brought it over from Scotland when they immigrated to Canada in the early 1900’s. It contains the Authorized Version (KJV) as well as the Revised Version in parallel form. It is prefaced by a lengthy explanation as to why the Revised Version was considered necessary. A portion of that explanation is as follows: “They have therefore departed from it only in cases where they disagreed with the translators of 1611 as to the meaning or construction of a word or sentence; or where necessary for the sake of uniformity to render such parallel passages as were identical in Hebrew by the same English words, so that an English reader might know at once that a difference in the translation corresponded to a difference in the original; or where the language of the Authorized Version was liable to be misunderstood by reason of its being archaic or obscure; or finally, where the rendering of an earlier English version seemed preferable, or where by an apparently slight change it was possible to bring out more fully the meaning of a passage of which the translation was already accurate.”

I’ve attached photos of the Matthew 9:17 verse that was mentioned in your Blog. I have looked at most of the examples that have been referenced in your Blog and they are as the photo example I’ve included…..meaning that both translation are included. The only exception is that the AV and the RV are exactly the same with the “the wolf shall dwell with lamb” reference…..it’s the same translation in both.

I have never responded to any blog until now so I was unsure if I could include photo attachments, hence why I have used this email format. If you would like further evidence as to what this bible contains please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

‘Mary’

I didn’t understand Mary’s question. I wrote: 

Please write out the two versions in your bible with and without abbreviations. Have you checked them with biblegate.com to see if they all agree? There are many ‘revised’ and ‘authorized’ descriptions in the different translations. i just want to make sure we’re talking about the same versions.

Are there any notes in your Bible that mention work done after the original work? Does it name all the scholars involved?

Allan

Mary wrote:

Certainly I can write out the two versions as requested. But, before I do that, is there a way you can enlarge the photos I sent you as they contain the two versions that we are talking about. When I check with biblegateway.com the Authorized King James Version (AKJV-  that’s the one with the translationbottles) is exactly the same as the Bible I have. The Revised Standard Version (RSV – with wineskintranslation) that is on their website is copyright 1946, whereby my version is year 1895 and there are only slight differences between them… Mary

Then it hit me what Mary was really talking about. So I wrote:

The ME is so mind-bending in its implications that I’m just today realizing what’s really bothering you, notwithstanding that you made it very clear in your previous emails. See, I have just taken it for granted that ‘what happened’ with your book is not different in principal from, say, Sex in/and the City having two versions of the title in the same ‘Newsroom’ show. Or ‘Franco Colombo’ spoken in Pumping Iron while in credits his name is ‘ColombU.

But now I see your point that your bible is a particularly egregious case of futzing with ‘reality’ due to its age. But how is your case different from a KJV bible, say, the same age as yours with the ‘bottles’ version? It still had to change… in an ‘impossible’ way.

I didn’t understand your confusion b/c your bible is agreeing with Gateway and presumably all other hard copy

bibles of those translations. So what’s the ‘problem’?

Do you see what I mean?

However, you say there are slight differences between your RSV and Gateway. Even a tiny change is significant, if only to tell us that they are (innocently) futzing between printings. This is a question that research could answer, but now you have helped.

Can you see (in your bible) what date they say they last made changes of any kind? In your Revised edition they have that note saying it was changed from ‘bottles’ – can you tell the date of that change?

Yes, it’s confusing all right. At some ‘point in time’ (or timeline) your AKJV column said ‘wine-skins’ (so did the Revised edition column, but without the note in the margin!) then the AKJV column was ‘magically’ changed to ‘bottles’, which meant that the Revised edition (RSV) added the note without changing the word, since that version has always used ‘wine-skins’.

It’s nuts but seems to indicate that the concept of ‘time lines’ (whatever that means) must be at work here… somehow — as i do not picture a ‘moment in time’ wherein you could theoretically watch the ‘magic change’ taking place. I don’t think that’s the way it could work.

The ‘bad’ thing is that it appears like there is a malevolent agenda behind at least some of the changes. If it were a random screw up there would not be any recognizable pattern to the changes — like the movie lines always being ‘bad writing’ and the biblical changes having perverse subtext. This is the most worrisome aspect.  And I hate to say it but the whole ME adds up to possible evidence that we may be living in a computer simulation. (The ‘moon numbers’ could imply this as well.)

Have you watched Sean Carroll’s video on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics? Give it a look.

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I don’t know if the above is a help or not, in understanding what we’re up against. It’s obvious why some folks get flustered and give up thinking about this and write it off to (other) human’s stupidity; it’s easier on the mind.

One thing I’m sure of is that a biblical scholar, whose life’s work is getting the translation right, would not change wording in a way that makes a passage nonsense: Bottles do not break when filled with wine, new or otherwise.

Allan