In my book What’s in a Version? and in my Bible Translation Selection Tool I do not deal much with the question of whether a translation is a revision or not, except when the translation is not taken from the original languages. In this entry, I’m going to look at a couple of revision histories,…
In George Orwell’s Animal Farm things eventually boil down to “all the animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” I think I can apply this to Bible translations as well as to animals, especially when one is looking for an authoritative translation. The fact is that no translation perfectly reflects the…
Wayne Leman on his Better Bibles blog, created an exceptional entry on the need for having translations that put the Bible into comprehensible, current English. Too often in the church we assume that people know things. We assume they know how to find the church, when services are, what is appropriate for them or for…
Oddly enough, while I’ve been commenting on The Book of Daniel on NBC, I’ve also been studying the Biblical book of Daniel for a discussion I’m having on the Compuserve Religion Forum. So if you were interested in the TV show, this is definitely not the entry for you. I grew up as a Seventh-day…
In my initial entry on testing prophets I listed five approaches to determining whether a word someone claims comes from God is actually from God. The third of those items was “Access to inside information, or is in GodÂ’s councils.” You may be wondering, and rightfully so, how I distinguish this from other approaches. Surely…
For the last few weeks I’ve been talking about inspiration, whether that relates to written scripture, or to someone claiming to be speaking for God. Today I’m going to start discussing the tests of a prophet, which might be equated to tests for inspiration, that are used in Christianity. These find their source somewhere in…
I’m continuing a fairly long series of essays on inspiration. Some of this material will be included in my new book, When People Speak for God, though I haven’t scheduled a time yet when I’ll complete that manuscript. In my previous entry, The Heart of Inspiration, I said that inspiration starts from any experience of…
I’ve been talking about inspiration and canonization in several posts, and I’m finally ready to get down to talking about inspiration. First, I’d like to remind you of my existing essays on inspiration, Inspiration, Biblical Authority, and Inerrancy, which goes into some detail on the topic of Biblical inspiration. But now I want to look…
I’m back to thinking about inspiration today. Many people think about the terms “inspired” and “canonical” as nearly synonymous. Generally they are not. The term “canon” relates to idea of canon law, in other words a book is canonical when canon laws defines it as authoritative. Now the edges have become blurred over the years,…
I’ve been doing some discussion of the prophecies of the book of Daniel recently on the Compuserve Christian Fellowship Forum. The discussion there is about the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of the investigative judgment and the time prophecy of Daniel 8:14. But that is not what this post is about. As I reviewed the many related…
