Sunday, May 17, 2009

Amazon.com: Journey from Texts to Translations, The: The Origin and Development of the Bible: Paul D. Wegner: Books

Amazon.com: Journey from Texts to Translations, The: The Origin and Development of the Bible: Paul D. Wegner: Books

Recently wrote the following when writing to a friend interested in the history of the development of the bible, the original texts and translations:

Your question is kind of complicated, because what you're looking for might not be in just one book. There are a lot of historical debates about when precisely each book of the bible was written. As for histories of translation, the more contemporary history of that is clear, but, for example, the Septuagint (the Old Testament in Greek) is called the Septuagint because there was a theory that 70 monks went into their cells and translated the bible and came out with identical translations, which we now know isn't historically accurate.

So, one good possibility is to get a really good study bible, which will have a lot of that information. I like the Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha. The new Lutheran Study Bible from Augsburg Fortress has a good history in it. The HarperCollins Study Bible is also good.

As for books about this topic, there are some very academic books I can recommend if you are interested in that. Maybe the best for your purposes might be:

http://www.amazon.com/Journey-Texts-Translations-Origin-Development/dp/0801027993/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242613349&sr=8-1

1 comment:

  1. Wish I had that when I was leading our study with "Rediscovering the Book of Faith" which is on how the bible came to be and is very very lightweight and needs a LOT of supplementing and I was scrambling for resources to fill in the holes.

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