What’s your current favorite Bible?

May 3, 2024 12:31 PM

I have a mid-20ish year old family member who recently has been drawn into conversations with what I think of as (possibly ungenerously) “FaceBook Christians” - people who reference Bible-quotation memes as support for their political beliefs. This young person is smart, and reads poetry, but is unfamiliar with the Bible in general. I want to give them a Bible to support their desire to learn more on their own: it needs to hit that sweet spot between…

… plain-English accessible and still managing to capture the poetic nature of much of the original text (my litmus test right now is The Book of Job; tho anything that includes the New Testament and comes close to the types of translations Everett Fox did of the Tanakh would be a joy).

posted by Silvery Fish to Religion & Philosophy (21 answers total)

Oxford Annotated Bible New Revised Edition is what my Catholic school had me get. If you put that into a search engine you'll find it everywhere.
posted by East14thTaco at 12:49 PM on May 3 [2 favorites]

I have used a bunch of translations over the years but if I were interested in studying the Bible as a piece of culture I would probably want to read the KJV, just because it's had such an enormous impact on the English language. (Maybe with a modern translation alongside it... my own Bible is an NRSV but I don't have any really strong feelings about the different ones available.)

An unusual but lovely 20th century translation is the Knox Bible, translated by an English Catholic priest and author (of both theology and golden-age detective fiction).
posted by Polycarp at 12:50 PM on May 3 [4 favorites]

For a modern, accessible Bible I tend to lean toward The Message but I prefer it in contrast to the KJV or the Catholic bibles I dealt with for 16 years of schooling. YMMV of course.
posted by forthright at 12:54 PM on May 3 [2 favorites]

As an 11-12 y.o. I won the Junior Scripture Prize because I read, week by week, with care and attention, numerous chapters of the KJV. When my girls got to be the same age, I thought it might be neat to introduce them to one of the key texts of Anglo-European history. I found it really hard graft = out of practice. So I canned the generational transmission project. In other words, KJV might not be the best place to start for today's youth.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:15 PM on May 3 [1 favorite]

What about a stack of bibles? They aren't expensive, and it highlights the fact that all bibles are interpretations. Throw a Quran in there too. You don't have to read them all from the beginning to the end, but when you meet a quote, you can look them up in your various versions.

If this is too crazy, I agree with Polycarp, because I feel it is important that one can recognize the text when it appears in other texts.
posted by mumimor at 1:17 PM on May 3

A famous book about the Bible and literature is The Great Code by Northrop Frye
A great critic of taking the Bible the wrong way is Bishop John Shelby Spong. One of his books is Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalists.

Perhaps these might be interesting to him if he wants to continue studying.
posted by Enid Lareg at 1:23 PM on May 3 [3 favorites]

I grew up evangelical, so those Facebook Christians are kind of my people (though I'm no longer religious at all). I really like Peter Enns's How the Bible Actually Works. It's a nice companion to any translation of the Bible. It offers accessible information about how and why scriptures were written, cultural and linguistic considerations for better appreciating what they meant to the original audience, and thoughtful reflections on how modern believers and nonbelievers can approach the texts. I'm still an atheist, but the book left me feeling warmth and curiosity toward the people who wrote, compiled, revered, and preserved the Bible throughout its history, and appreciation for the people who are trying to do intellectually honest and meaningful study of the Bible today. Basically, if Facebook Christians are offering easy, flippant, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it," Bible content, Peter Enns offers a richer and more nuanced, but still accessible perspective.
posted by theotherdurassister at 2:10 PM on May 3 [4 favorites]

I've read numerous translations, and I think the best contemporary translations are The Hebrew Bible by Robert Alter (for the Old Testament) and The New Testament by David Bentley Hart.

Someone upthread recommended the King James Version (KJV). It's very beautifully written and poetic. If you go this route, I highly recommend the Norton Critical Edition (Old Testament and New Testament + Apocrypha).

Please advise your family member that it is very difficult to read the Bible straight through. It's probably advisable to bounce around, and there are lots of different "Bible reading plans" out there.

My own suggestion would be to read the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch), then Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon, then the first five books of the New Testament. That gives enough context for them to bounce around in the other books.

This lecture series from Yale could also make a good companion.
posted by matkline at 2:40 PM on May 3 [8 favorites]

For a college class that was for general students but reasonably serious, we used the Revised Standard Version. It was a very mainstream version and quite readable, but with attention to scholarship and accurate translation; our professor basically thought if you weren't going to learn Hebrew and Greek it was the best you could do. It's full of footnotes giving alternate phrasing from various early sources. It does not include other commentary.

That's generally been replaced with the New Revised Standard Version, which I assume carries on the tradition of solid scholarship.

I kind of agree that reading the Bible on its own is tough. On the one side, there's a huge historical and political context for much of it that you cannot glean from internal context; on the other there are standard religious and literary traditions that drive interpretation and should not be ignored. Sometimes both: The New Testament picks up after a gap of several centuries from the canonical Old Testament, during which certain meanings were read back into the older work and became "standard" or at least plausible.
posted by mark k at 2:59 PM on May 3 [3 favorites]

NRSV for accuracy in translation, with some additional material like Oxford Companion or other academic annotation.
posted by rikschell at 3:02 PM on May 3 [4 favorites]

Possibly my favorite Scout* badge is the advanced christianity one, which represents a very different period of my life.

I would suggest something from Karen Armstrong, like The Bible, A biography or her work A History of God as a great place to start on this path. I found her insight a much much better guide to learning about the bible/christianity than anything I got from the hours and hours I spent digging through the actual bible.

And that was a period of my life where I was regularly attending church, regularly going to readings and so I was fully immersed in the culture. Just sitting down and reading the bible would be like reading Shakespeare without seeing any of it actually performed, even a 'modern' version is going to lack so much of the context of the work.


*Its important to note that this was Canadian variation.
posted by zenon at 3:14 PM on May 3 [4 favorites]

FYI Catholic Bibles have seven books and some chapters that aren’t in Protestant Bibles, so you might want to consider that when making your choice.
posted by FencingGal at 4:52 PM on May 3 [2 favorites]

Another vote for The Message for an engaging, accessible read that captures the poetry of the stories. You’ll get some bristles in some contexts if you quote from it (it’s described as a “paraphrase”, not a translation) but it’s excellent as an entry point.
As a companion to whichever Bible you select, I recommend The Bible Project, especially their series on how to read the Bible.

One final note: if you’re happy to spend a bit more money, I suggest buying a journaling Bible of the translation of your choice. It’s helpful to have some extra space to jot down notes and questions, especially if this is an academic exercise more than a spiritual read.
posted by third word on a random page at 6:21 PM on May 3

I also vote for The Message.

If you want accuracy of translation, you really want the NRSVUE - that's the NRSV Updated Edition. It came out two years ago and is the most recent version I would suggest. It is what I would give to someone who really wanted to study the Bible, and also what my church uses for readings.

I do love the King James, but for this purpose I would not recommend it. It's too hard to read and can be very misleading in meanings.
posted by branca at 8:12 PM on May 3

There are lots of apps which let you flip through different versions of the Bible. I use that when I’m trying to understand one part because reading five versions makes the meaning clearer and highlights how important translation is.

I have a NKJV journaling bible which as a physical object I love - journaling means basically extra space on the margins to write notes.

I would definitely get her the Armstrong or another about the Bible book over a specific edition. It’s seeing the Bible as a living document rather than a cryptic text to decode that helps.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 10:07 PM on May 3

I came in to recommend Karen Armstrong's books as a good introduction to thinking about the bible and the ideas within it as a thing that was came into existence (unlike other religious texts eg The Koran or the Book of Mormon it is known and accepted by everyone to have been developed across centuries).

And then another recommendation for The Message if you want something genuinely accessible, and NRSV if you want something scholarly. In my very liberal religious circles, The Message is sometimes perceived as a little too evangelical but for your purposes I think that would be helpful.
posted by plonkee at 3:11 AM on May 4 [2 favorites]

The Oxford New Revised Standard Version is the standard study bible for college students and for folks in the sorts of denominations that talk about translations and entertain multiple meanings of texts. The footnotes are amazing and very helpful in understanding how and why texts have been read different ways by different people.

The King James Bible is a bad translation (bad decisions were made to turn the text explicitly misogynist in places that it's not, including misgendering women to hide the truth that the early Christian church had women as leaders) and hard to read for modern readers.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:30 AM on May 4 [1 favorite]

The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible is a useful resource for anyone interested in meta discussion of scripture.
posted by abraxasaxarba at 11:48 AM on May 4

I'll add to the chorus in support of the NRSV. Something worth understanding about it is that it is, in a sense, part of a lineage that traces back to the KJV. There was an effort in the late 19th century to revised the KJV in light of modern scholarship; this produced what was known as the Revised Version, and an offshoot called the American Standard Version in 1901. Then the Revised Standard Version came out in the 1950s, and the New Revised Standard Version in 1989, each reflecting the latest scholarly findings.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:26 PM on May 4 [1 favorite]

For classwork, the go-to for us has been the Catholic Study Bible by the OUP. It has a very large amount of supporting material and is generally available online.

The language is accessible, maybe to a fault - it's the translation of the New American Bible Revised Edition (which is what's used liturgically for Catholics in the US as well). The translation is generally clear and direct, but some (including myself) think that some of the poetry was lost in the process. A new translation is underway which is going to address a bit of this - you can get a sense of the language here (see the comparison between the Psalms).

For devotional/contemplative reading, my go-to is the Catholic version of the RSV mentioned above. The KJV-like version for those who prefer it would be the Douay-Rheims Version. I have one but don't use it very often.
posted by jquinby at 2:08 PM on May 4

plain-English accessible and still managing to capture the poetic nature of much of the original text

On an extended vacation, I brought along a KJV. One contribution I’ll add to this thread is to say that I was able to read it all the way through. Time was all that was needed; I had it then. A decision which helped was skimming in the “begats”: as it’s largely formulaic, much of what varies in that section is names, e.g. Methuselah.

Your note about English accessibility reminded me of God’s Bestseller: William Tyndale, Thomas More, and the writing of the English Bible - a story of martyrdom and betrayal. Here’s a section:
‘Nellen ge deman,’ a verse in the Anglo-Saxon gospel runs, ‘daet ge ne syn fordemede.’ In Wycliffe, that is rendered: ‘Nyle ze deme, that se be nat demyd.’ But the sentence in Tyndale - ‘iudge not, lest ye be iudged’ - needs only the substitution of ‘you’ for ‘ye’, to pass muster in our own English.

Moynahan’s book is generally more narrative than hermeneutic. I provide the above passage mostly as an illustration of why Tyndale's poetry might be my current English fave (if I only had time for reading more now).
posted by HearHere at 8:15 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]