Amazon.com UnSpun Best English Bible Translation
I discovered Amazon.com UnSpun (and wrote a bit about it here) and of course immediately located a list of the best English Bible translations. Here it is:
Update: I am going along with Peter Kirk as posted on the Better Bibles Blog and replacing this poll with the one he suggested.
I think it would be interesting to get the votes of many of the well-informed folks in the blogosphere to vote on this one and perhaps change the rankings a bit. I suspect that with the votes, there’s a great deal of simple name recognition involved in the current rankings.
So those of us who have nothing better to do than vote in useless polls–how about we give it a try? I notice the CEV and the TNIV, two of my favorites, are way down the list.
PS: Actually I would note that the CEV, TNIV, and REB were significantly improved in ranking by my votes.
Henry, I don’t know if you have followed what has been happening to this poll, but it has now become not just ridiculous but also libellous and blasphemous. See what I have written about it at Better Bibles Blog, post newly edited. You may like to follow me in changing the link to this alternative poll.
This version of the poll seems to be better than the other one. But it still looks to me as if someone has got at it. I don’t see how “Student Bible” and “The Christian Bible” could have got so high unless someone has found a way of casting multiple votes. That wouldn’t actually be very hard as I think all you need is to connect from different IP addresses, and you can do that by connecting from different friends’ computers and Internet cafes, dialling up to different ISPs etc. And there is obviously someone out there determined to wreck this poll. The moral of this is really that polls like this are of rather little value.
Peter,
Yes, I’ve always felt these polls did little, but then I read a bunch of stuff about making a site interactive, and started playing with them. Some of the more technical polls, like these on my Computer Services blog (that’s my “tentmaking”) seem to function pretty well and actually provide interesting information.