My first Bible.
My first Bible that I could call my own was The Jerusalem Bible, Reader’s Edition, the 1968 edition. This Bible includes several additional books known as the Apocrypha. It is a paraphrase, or better said, a “thought-for-thought” translation rather than a literal translation as is the King James (mostly*). (There are later editions of The Jerusalem Bible which make substantial changes. Plus, there is a “New Jerusalem Bible” which has further emendations. I am not fond of either of the latter editions, which seem to put a more modern theological and politically correct twist into the translation.)
In the years that we study the Bible in Gospel Doctrine class, I read the LDS edition of the King James Version, but I keep several other translations at hand, including The Jerusalem Bible, and a 4-translation Today’s Parallel Bible from Zondervan. The latter consists of the King James (KJV), New International Version (NIV), New Living Translation (NLT, a derivative of The Living Bible), and the New American Standard Bible (NASB). The printing format of the Today’s Parallel Bible puts the four translations in parallel columns for easy comparison.
Although the KJV is the official LDS Bible, there are known deficiencies, such that one should pay attention to the LDS footnotes that are designated “HEB” (an alternate translation from the Hebrew), “GR” (an alternate translation from the Greek), “OR” (an alternate translation), “IE” (an explanation), and “JST” (Joseph Smith Translation, either in the footnote, or in the JST appendix.)
Per the advice of a professional LDS Institute teacher, on one Gospel-Doctrine-cycle of reading through the Bible I used a colored pencil to highlight all the above-listed footnotes, and I also highlighted the corresponding superscripted character in the text. On subsequent readings of the Bible, whenever I came across a highlighted superscript, I then knew to read the footnote. It slowed me down those two years, but it really helped on the next cycle.
The LDS footnotes made the passages more understandable. I also noticed that many of the LDS alternate translations match, or are synonyms for, what is in the NIV text.
However, there are still some idioms (Hebrew, Greek and Jacobean English), usage and grammar that are still not clear in the KJV. In those cases, if the footnote does not adequately clarify the passage, I refer to the NIV, the NASB, and the Jerusalem Bible. I generally find the NLT to be too watered down, too loosely translated, and too politically correct as its predecessor The Living Bible. But if the NLT happens to agree with the NIV and NASB, that gives me all the more confidence in the NIV/NASB translation of the passage.
This past year as we studied the New Testament, I’ve given more focus to The Jerusalem Bible as my alternate/additional source, and have come to a greater appreciation of it, enough so to write this post. The 1968 edition is old enough that it does not contain much of the later political correctness that seems to have infused various subsequent translations. (There was a 1971 edition, but I don’t know on which side of the changes that particular one falls on. I believe that all Jerusalem Bible and New Jerusalem Bible editions post-1971 are on the PC side.)
There were only three or four passages in the Old Testament in which I could not find some consensus among the NIV, NASB, and Jerusalem, or at least come away with a general idea of what the passage was about. If those three all mutually disagreed, I then turned to the Amplified Bible.
*In case anyone thinks the KJV is a truely literal translation, the words in italics in the KJV are not in the original text. They were added by the translators to render the sentence or phrase meaningful in English. If you see a KJV passage that seems to be at odds with LDS doctrine, in addition to checking the footnotes, try reading it without the italicized words.
