How do I pick a good Bible?
A simple question with a rather complex answer. First of all, the inquirer is really asking several questions at once:
Which will be truly readable?
Which can I trust?
Which will supply me with the deepest understanding?
Which will be affordable?
The first criterion listed implies that the language need be familiar -- likely in one's mother tongue. The second asks whether the translator was capable, honest, and truthful. Number three suggests a match between reader and the read: is the vocabular appropriate to the reader. The fourth criterion points to the tension between quality media and the means of acquisition.
Later we'll consider the criteria listed above in more detail, but for now let's begin our study by tracing a bit of history of the English language and the ultimate translations into the many modern English Bible versions.
What is English?
The spoken language of those who lived from the 5th to 11th centuries A.D. in what was to become England consisted of various dialects of the germanic regions from which the invading people had come:
The Angles were Germanic-speaking people who took their name from the ancestral cultural region of Angeln, a district located in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany (situated on the narrow peninsula between the North and Baltic seas). The Angles were one of the main groups that settled in Britain in the post-Roman period.
Saxons were from southeastern Germany (from Southern Jutland, on the Baltic coast).
Jutes were also from Jutland situated on the narrow peninsula between the North and Baltic seas. They invaded south and southeastern England. According to Bede the Jutes occupied Hampshire, Kent and the Isle of Wight.
The emerging English language did not see any standardization until the country saw the transfer of power in 1066 (the transition from the Dark Ages resulting from the Norman Conquest where Duke William of Normandy prevails and England's King Harold II dies in battle). The linguistic form existing from then till the mid-11th c. is known as Late Old English.
Thus, it was the need to communicate the Gospel in meaningful, efficient ways and to adequately convey the elements of theology that gave rise to the English language.
The earliest attempts to reduce the message of the scriptures to English from the Latin Vulgate were made ca. 647-680 by the English poet/Saxon herdsman/Catholic priest, Caedmon, who learned to compose one night in a dream.
Caedmon used a form of Anglo-Saxon poetry traditionally applied to the veneration of kings and princes, but altered the vernacular in a way that would cause it to refer to God instead of a monarch.
Caedmon's only known surviving work is Caedmon's Hymn, the nine-line alliterative vernacular praise poem in honor of God which he supposedly learned to sing in his initial dream. See the image below:
