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You rated the Bible.

I so did. Don't be jealous.

Only 4 stars? Aren't you a little worried about hell fire and brimstone raining down on you?

I probably should be!

I won’t claim to know God’s mind, but I’m pretty sure I’ve done a few other things that were much worse, so I just might have to take the risk, lol. Plus, I still maintain my claim that since I’ve never read it in the original version, I can never really know, y’know? HA!

I don't think any of us will ever get to read the original books of the Bible, but that would be interesting, wouldn't it? A few arguments could finally be settled over what was lost/added during all of the translations!

Your review cracked me up because my daddy is an old-fashioned conservative Baptist preacher. (There are a few other preacher kids on here too, but I won't name names!)

Tammy =)

Amen! Yes, I'd like to be able to read the original books--all of them. I don't care for being told what was meant based on what someone else decided to interpret and include.

Nice review on something so controversial.

Only a 4? But it's got everything. Lust, betrayal, good, evil, sex, fornication, adultry, human sacrifice, magic, ghosts, miracles, love stories, evil guys, good guys (and gals, I'm just being generic), saints, and sinners! All in one monster collection of books!!
J

Julie, u r right on that! It definitely has it all. But I do feel like I should mention that it contains 66 books altogether :)
I'm still fond of the Old King James Version myself.

ROTFL Julie! How true!;)

Pamela, I grew up on the old KJV, and there are some verses that just don't sound right in other translations.

I have the NIV, but recently I discovered the ESV (English Standard Version) which seems easier to understand to me. Of course, I'm no scholar of Bible translations, so with my luck it's probably one of the less accurate ones. I certainly haven't run into any preachers lately who seem to be using it, so I'm guessing at the very least it's a less popular one.

Another good thing about the King James Version is there is no copyright on it. I'm no scholar either, thank goodness. Most of them know even less than I do :)

Oh, yeah! No copyright is awesome. My husband was so ticked when he went looking for free versions of the Bible to put on his PDA, and most of the more popular translations were copyrighted. The vast majority of the ones he found were so obscure we'd never heard of them. KJV is super-easy to get in e-format though, and he found the ESV that I like too.

I think you made excellent points in your review and the 4 Star Rating is fair. There are parts in the Book that are slow or hard to understand but could be because of "reprints/rewrites".

Thanks everybody. My whole intent was to write something that wouldn’t piss a bunch of people off. Most of the negative reviews I read were written for the sole purpose of pissing people off and that didn’t sit well with me. But then a lot of the glowing reviews were written with the attitude, “if you don’t give it a fantastic rating you are not a Christian and you will go to hellllllll (and I’d like to pretend James Earl Jones using the echo feature on a microphone said the part in italics) and anytime one person insinuates that another person is going to go to hell for their thoughts/actions/beliefs, it’s going to piss them off. So yeah, no pissing people off. That is sort of my modus operandi when discussing things of a religious nature with anybody, regardless of what they believe or don’t believe and it’s worked well for me thus far.

I also have a pretty quirky sense of humor and the fact that there were a bunch of people writing serious reviews in order to rile up the people who didn’t believe the same thing made me feel all tingly and excited. I can’t resist a good old-fashioned internet flame war when I see one and I couldn’t not jump in and attempt to share my two cents in such a way that says, “yeah, I’m a member of the Christian faith. A bad one, but that’s between me and God, so there you go and this is how I try to make my point without pissing people off. You should try it sometime.� Hehe.

Oh! And yes, the parts of the Bible that are hard to understand are probably in large part due to the number of times it has been translated. I’m not entirely sure what the timeframe is, but I believe the first time it appeared in the written word was in Greek. Before that, everything in the Bible had been passed down orally for a verrrry long time in a number of languages such as Hebrew, Latin…some others that I can’t remember from the Bible class I took.

And the other thing to take into consideration is that when it was written down by the Greeks, you find translations from a verbal perspective and also from a cultural perspective.

So it starts in Hebrew. Then is written down in Greek. And then it is translated into Latin. And from there it is translated into German. And then English. Or whatever. I really don’t know the order of these things, but I do know that there is a somewhat newer translation out there where someone took the “original� Greek version of the Bible and translated it directly into English (because most of our English translations are actually translations of translations of translations and you never know what could have been lost in translation—just ask Bill Murray, he’s the expert on that). But anyway, yeah.

This could turn into a jumping off point for me to question certain fundamentalist beliefs (um, as in, are you really sure you feel that comfortable taking it *that* literally?) but that would borderline break my rule of not pissing people off so I’ll just insinuate that I seriously question the validity of those sorts of opinions and leave it at that. :P

Thank you for an unbiased review... Whether or not you believe it, it gets tiring to see
people supporting and then being attacked. Thank you for not attacking it in an unbiased way!
God Bless!

So you can't rate a book five stars because you didn't read it in its original languages? I'll probably never learn French but I'd say the English translation of The Count of Monte Cristo deserves five stars.

Actually the translations are as many a one translation. (Original text to English.) at least this version is. The only words that are changed are words like THE and unimportant words that don't actually Chang the meaning of the text. And if the bible is gods word than he will let you hear what he wants you to hear and you should trust him the rest of the way.

Paul and Eddie, thanks for keeping it real, dudes.

It's interesting that even though there are so many bibles, the difference between them is about less than5%. This is a good review. And I agree and plan on learning Hebrew ASAP.

I hope everyone here believes

If you're actually rating "The Bible" as being 4 stars, that should have you worried! If you're rating the translation of the Bible, that's completely fine.