New Testament Question
- Thread starter Gazeebo
- Start date
Not sure what you mean. This post is a bit incoherent.
Is there an older English translation than the King James? Is that what you mean?
I own the Orthodox Study Bible. Which the Old Testament is called the Septuagint. My question is, is there a New Testament version as old as the Septuagint is that was translated from Hebrew to Greek?
The New Testament was originally written in Greek.
You can find a translation of the original Greek that is explicitly Orthodox and is called the EOB (Eastern Orthodox Bible) a print on demand version exists on Amazon.
Do you have any personal experience with the EOB, is it worth getting? I quite like the OSB/NKJV text and can't really see a good enough reason to change over. It is easy to understand while the style maintains a degree of beauty and elegance, only bested by the KJV in that regard.
It does appear however that the EOB New Testament was translated from the Patriarchal Text (PT), whereas the NKJV/OSB/KJV were all translated from the Textus Receptus (TR). Someone did an analysis and found that the PT and TR are very close to each other, with only a few points of divergence. Both are faithful to Church tradition, but I suppose if you want the ideal text the PT is slightly more faithful than the TR. Both are certainly better than the Critical/Alexandrian Text used by virtually every modern English translation aside from the OSB/NKJV.
The notes are very useful. It can be worth getting just for these. So you could get some benefit from it even if you were using your familiar translation and then looking at the notes to learn more about how the passages are translated and so on.
I have the EOB translation and generally I really like it, there are just a few choices they made that annoy me, like they're trying too hard to be different from traditional translations. For example they never translate 'worship' as 'worship' and instead always translate it as "express adoration" which is very clunky and often immersion-breaking if I'm reading aloud. But mostly it is a very clear and lucid translation that I think was done in good faith.
If you're looking for the oldest manuscripts, then you will want a Bible that is based off of the critical text, such as the NASB, ESV, LSB. This means you will have a Bible which Old Testament uses the Masoretic Text, but informed by both the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls (which predate the Septuagint). And a New Testament based off of primarily Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, but informed by various papyri that have been discovered in recent years.
The Legacy Standard Bible is my new go-to and is the best English translation available, in my opinion.