Free Bible & Other Bible Materials                           Last Updated 11/02/2007

 2) The earliest most generally recognized translations of the Old Testament that we have today are: The "Peshitto Bible" (Syriac Peshitto) translated directly from Hebrew (the original language of the Bible) manuscripts around 100-300 AD (and there's about 300 copies today of the original) however I cannot seem to find an english version so if anyone out there knows of one please contact me with the information (there is also another Peshitto 'or Peshitta' bible that has a similar name referred to as the "Old Syriac" or "Curetonian" (discovered in 1800's AD by Cureton hence the name) which is supposedly a later translation from around 300-400 AD but the Old Testament in it was not directly translated from the Hebrew sripts, however it does also contain early translations of most of the New Testament).  Another of the oldest translations we have is known as the "Septuagint" (also known as the LXX or 70 for it's 70 translators) which is an early Greek version of the Old Testament translated directly from the Hebrew scripts made in Alexandria, Egypt in about 200 BC for the library there (the Torah was translated first, then the rest of the Old Testament later); a note about the Septuagint is there seems to be no copies of this original so when people say it is the oldest version they are usually talking about copies of this version (like the Codex Vaticanus or Codex Alexandrinus or Codex Sinaiticus or other codices) that were translated from it and the three I just mentioned were all translated around 300-400 AD and are among the oldest codices.  Some of the oldest Bible scripts (of the Old and New Testatment) are known collectively as the "Old Latin" (Itala) which were translations around 200 AD.  St Jerome translated the Bible (the Old and New Testament) around 400 AD into Latin from the Septuagint for the Old Testament.  Later he made a revised translation of the Bible, known as the Latin Vulgate meaning common version (a.k.a Old Latin Vulgate but not to be confused with the Old Latin texts), where he went to Jerusalem and revised his earlier translated version of the Old Testament from the Septuagint and instead directly used the Hebrew texts there at that time to help do that.  About 1000 AD another version of the Old Testament came into being which is known as the "Masoretic" Old Testament, it was written in Hebrew by an order of Jewish people and it is reputed they had great standards for keeping the old manuscripts intact and making copies.  There's also a Samaritan copy of the Pentateuch from Hebrew texts which is dated from around 1000 AD.

 3) There were and are a fair number of texts translated; another translation was made by Origen in about 200 AD known as the "Hexpala" (six) because he made a parallel bible with six versions in it: the first in Hebrew, the second a transliteration 'transcribing from one alphabet to another' of Hebrew into Greek, the third was Aquilla's version of the Old Testament (in Greek from Hebrew texts), the fourth was Symmachus's version of the Old Testament (in Greek from the Septuagint), the fifth was Theodations version of the Old Testament (in Greek from the Septuagint) and the sixth was from the Septuagint.  His work today is lost however there are some remnants left.

 4) Now let's go to the New Testament; most Bibles are either translated from what is known today as the "Majority" or "Minority" texts.  First the Majority texts (a.k.a. Textus Receptus or the Received texts, Byzantine 'a.k.a. Syrian' texts, or Traditional texts) are mostly composed of a lot (about 5000 supposedly, hence the name Majority) of primarily existing different Greek texts of the New Testament (from about 200 AD to about 1600 AD, some have the whole New Testament and some have just parts) that all seem to match up very well together (although there are some differences in every text) so they validate each other as good translations and they also seem to cohere very well with the Peshitto bible, parts of the Old Latin Vulgate, parts of Codex A (which will be discussed in the next section '5') and some other texts.  From about 1500-1600 AD these texts were put into editions, the main people (among others) that translated these texts and put them into editions were Disideria Erasmus who made some editions, Stepanus who made editions of these also known as the "Textus Receptus", Theodore Beza made some editions based on Stephanus's work and Elzevir who made an edition also; there have been others (who have used the same and/or different texts) that have, in later years, added editions to what might be known today as the Majority texts.  Now the Minority texts (a..k.a. the Critical or Alexandrian texts) are mainly the Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus however there are others in this type of text but not as many, hence the name Minority texts.  There are other types of texts (that have been labeled by a lot of people as such) that the scriptures are translated from; some are: "Syrian" (Sryriac and Peshitta among others), "Latin" (Old Latin Vulgate and other Old Latin texts), "Western" (Codex Bezae and some other texts), "Caesarean"(seems to be mixture of Western and Alexandrian), "Coptic" (late Egyptian written with Greek letters), "Ethiopian", "Gothic" and "Armenian".  Also "Citations" (ancient partial quotes of scripture that have been recorded) by certain people in letters etc through history may be used sometimes, by some, for review or comparison if they were from, for example, someone who studied the texts (like Origen) and made quotes of scripture in writings.  I should add, there have been others (since around the 1800's AD to the present) who have made newer editions, translated from various texts, and such work has been commonly called the "Standard" or sometimes "Eclectic" texts and the "standard" I'm sure may be revised again in the future as new additions of editions come out or new texts discovered or new technologies help etc.  I'm sure there are also other editions not mentioned here however these seem to be the main ones that are published today.  Also, FYI unicals are texts that are written in all capital letters while miniscules are texts written with capital and lower case letters and are a small cursive script; that's how a lot of the Greek translations are written and is another sort of a classification some use.

 5) Some more information about New Testament translations; a fair percentage of the translations of the New Testament today are from manuscripts (sometimes known as a codex or codices 'plural') which are translations that have either the whole, or most of the, Bible or just parts of it.  The big three codices are the "Codex Alexandrinus" a.k.a. Codex A which was supposedly written about 400 AD and is now in a British museum, the "Codex Vaticus" a.k.a Codex B which was found in the 1400's AD but supposedly written about 300 AD and is now in the Vatican, & the "Codex Sinaiticus" a.k.a. Codex Aleph found in the 1800's AD but supposedly written about 300 AD and is now in a Brittish museum.  There are more codices but just to list a few of the more popular ones here: Codex C or Codex Ephaemiresscpriptus which is in France, and Codex D a.k.a. the Bezae Codex which is in England.  An interesting note is that texts (codices) sometimes are given codes i.e. Codex Alexandrinus a.k.a. Codex A; scripts may be represented by letters (like Codex A) although a lot do have numbers, some scripts that were written in papyri have codes that start with a letter P then are followed by a letter or number and other ancient translations like the Old Latin Vulgate or the Syriac Peshitta may just use abbreviations.  

 6) There have been lots of discoveries of different manuscripts like the "Dead Sea Scrolls" (which were discovered in the 1900's), the "Oxyrhynchos Papyri" and the "Chester Beatty Papyri".  There are actually hundreds if not thousands of discovered texts but they don't seem to have the same clout and are not used as much and some may not be in as good of shape &/or might not have as much integrity or have been manipulated through the years while some may be in OK shape, however they can give comparisons to texts that we use today; like the Dead Sea Scrolls which have given more confirmation to the Old Testament translations we have today since the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls are supposedly about 2200 years old and they match very much to the texts that we have and use today.  The Dead Sea Scrolls actually are being recognized more because they are dated to around 200 BC, hence they would be the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament that we have today and in Hebrew.

7) Now which translations are better?  Probably the oldest and most purest, I suppose, and that may be at some debate.  I've seen a lot of examples of how different translations differ, however most differ in the translation and not in the meaning however there are some parts of some translations that differ in the meaning from each other a lot.  I've seen examples of how the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm different translations in the favor of another and vise versa.  My suggestions are below, however there are lots of decent translations and it's a judgment call.  I would suggest to ask God for guidance, research information and use discernment.  Keep in mind most translations differ on the translation not the meaning (an exceptionally large most at that) however in places where they do differ on the meaning then maybe you may reflect on what that meaning is and compare it to the context it is in and to the rest of the Bible and other translations.  There are a lot of Bible translations out there and you can research them and find out what texts they were translated from and how they were translated; basically they either are translated from the Latin Vulgate, Masoretic texts, the 3 main codices (Alexandrian) and Textus Receptus (Byzantine) although a lot are from a combination, and some are from a combination of other manuscripts all together.  For example the early KJV was mostly from the Masoretic texts for the Old Testament and the Textus Receptus for the New Testament & some other texts were also used for confirmation in areas, like the Old Latin Vulgate; later versions of the KJV (at least for the New Testament) use some other texts from which it's translated, the Douay-Rheims & Knox versions which the Catholic Church mostly use are translated from the Vulgate and there are many more examples that are interesting to look up.  You can also read transliterations (a little different from translations being more exact copies meaning transcribing from one alphabet to another) like one transliterated from Brenton from the Alexandrian Septuagint and a few others.

 This of course is a brief history and if interested you may have some things to start your own research or at least learned something or maybe knew it and have some corrections to offer.
 
 Even though you can learn from most translations and they are pretty similar (I've heard the similarity is over 98% which is super for texts that have been 'by far' the most translated for over 2000 years) my recommendations for studying the Bible are:
 
 1) Read with understanding, with out haste and ask for wisdom from God.

 2) Learn Hebrew and Greek and read the original texts.

 3) If it's not in your time for learning new languages than I would use a King James Bible; because it's the only one I know of where you can use a concordance (like the Strong's Concordance, recommended w/KJV) and look up each word in their original Hebrew & Greek meanings.  You may be surprised at some of the words you thought you knew.

 4) Also get a 1611 edition (1st edition KJV) it has some notes from the translators that are interesting.

 5) Get a James Moffatt Translation Bible (or another one that you've researched to be a good one); because when you get to some phrases or think that sounds weird, read it in this translation also, and it may give a little different translation to help understand that phrase.

 Bible Links:  Being Updated

 1) http://www.htmlbible.com/ By John Hurt, you can download a free KJV Bible also offers various tools, very good & free.

 2) http://www.crosswire.org/sword/index.jsp Great free KJV Bible + options to download lots & lots of very useful add on's like Strong's Concordance, dictionary, maps etc.

 3) freebible Great free KJV Bible, bigger download, easy to read format comes with maps and Strong's Concordance where you can just click a word and it tells you the Strong's Concordance definition; very practical.

 Of course these may help if you like using your computer, and may make reading more fun but you can of course find many useful things like the Strong's Concordance, Moffatt Bible Translation and KJV Bible's at the book stores which I also recommend supporting.  We have Bible Index Tabs if you'd like click here.

 A copy of the famous "Footprints" poem.

 Just two interesting Bible factoids:

 1) A lot of the times the word fear in the Bible may also be translated revere.

 2) If you're somewhat familiar with the Bible you may recall in Matthew 27:46 & Mark 15:34 when Jesus says "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?", many have pointed out (it seems believing they think) that means Jesus is questioning God; rather more likely he was reading from the scripture in Psalms 22:1 which starts out "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"  (More than a few divide Psalms into Books or Volumes [exactly how it's divided may differ], Psalms 1-41 seems vastly recognized as Volume or Book 1 by King David who's reign was around 1000 BC) and continues on to describe the crucifixion & other events that day; so I believe he was teaching while on the cross and fulfilling a prophesy, coincidence, you can read & research it.

Written by Thomas Keegan.