This weekend I went shopping for a Bible. (Actually, I went shopping for a copy of C. Tolkien's Children of Hurin, but the Big Chain Bookstore I went to was sold out.(!)) Big Chain had sent me a coupon so while I was there I went looking for another book to buy. Larry Gonick has a new book out, a lazy Saturday reading history-outside-my-time-period was tempting. Eisenman has another book out, a big thick one. One of my hobbies is 'bad bible scholarship' but I had things to do and did not, at the moment, have the patience to read his book in the spirit I would enjoy. Bishop Spong has another book out; Witherington's latest has a rather accusatory-sounding title, I'm curious what he has to say ... and some of the forthcoming titles I've seen in publisher's catalogs aren't yet out on shelves. A dummy's guide to Gnostic gospels also caught my eye - but lost my interest.

So I decided to buy a Bible.

I don't need a Bible. I somewhat collect different translations: the smaller ones stay near my computer, my Oxford Annotated Revised Standard Version stays on my study desk, the rest are boxed up awaiting the second house to hold all my books. However, I used to have a Bible (the Revised Standard Version that most scholars quote and refer to) that was the size of a checkbook. I carried it with me everywhere; I haven't been able to find it in the years since my last move, and according to the publisher and the Christian bookstore I bought it at, that edition is no longer made.

/K. sulks

I've often wished to have another small Bible to carry with me: scholars try to be courteous and quote and reference the passages they talk or write about, but they don't always .... or I sometimes have an idea that requires looking up another passage, so this weekend I went looking for a second small Bible.

The Big Chain Bookstore had six shelves of Bibles.

I knew from Amazon.com's "Bible Store" that most of them would be different packaging of the same small group of translations. At this particular Big Chain store there were, all told, five or six translations on all those shelves. (You could have put one book on each shelf and still represented every single one translation there....) There were plenty of small, portable ones, including one in a light metal case. (It always appeals to me: as long as it's shut and fastened it looks like it could stand everything but being dropped in water. ) However, most of the translations were on the 'hip' side of the spectrum or represented a particular devotional interest: that wasn't what I was shopping for, this weekend. (Tip: choose the translation(s) you want first, before going to the bookstore - then pull all the examples of that translation and sort through them on a café table or spare display table.) All of the RSV's and NRSV's were large study Bibles, as were most of the older, more sober translations. (Or, heaven help me, the 'large type' ones.) I finally found a small edition of the King James with a minimum of sidebars, cross-references, illustrations, helps, questions, and essays: it had none, except for a few pages in the back. (These, helpfully had Throckmorton's table of gospel parallels (listing which passages are in which of the synoptic gospels [Matthew, Mark, and Luke] and/or in John. It also had a list of famous passages in the Old and New Testaments. I have to keep a lot of things in my head and whatever I'm currently working on sometimes pushes out the basics of my field. )

I know the faults of the King James, for a historian: I know its age, how much less we knew about Biblical Greek and Classical Hebrew, and how many fewer Biblical manuscripts had been discovered then, how many other early translations and commentators were either as yet unknown or unconsulted. I've read Erhman's book, and others, on how it came to be and on other early translations of the Bible in to English. I appreciate that it puts words not in the original Greek or Hebrew in italics. When I read it I don't have to spend time puzzling over whether the rendition of a certain verse is simply nifty and palatable - or whether it on fact goes back to a certain branch of scholarly argument about the history and vocabulary of Greek or Hebrew. With the older translations I know better where that line is, with the contemporary 'hip' ones I spend too much time wondering how (or, very occasionally, if) A particular verse reads that way in Hebrew or Greek. (I like consulting the Hebrew and Greek, but the point of a translation is to spare me from always consulting the Hebrew and Greek - I can't read either as quickly as English.)

So I bought the King James, and a small, thin copy of the King James translation of the Apocrypha to go with it. (I study the Bible before the Reformation: I need to read the Bible as it stood before the Reformation.) They've now joined the collection of small dictionaries that go with me wherever I go and I'm happy to have (yet another) Bible.

-Kushana