Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Obviously it’s interesting to religious people and people who study religion. But, on top of that it’s an important document of the English language at that time. So it’s got linguistic interest as well. But that’s the case for many historic religious texts. One has to do with religion the other is the linguistic aspect. Of course there are other areas of interest like culture and so on.

View on HN

I grew up on the KJV so for me it's a very powerful cultural touchstone, just as much as Shakespeare with which it is roughly contemporary.

For me the atheist/rationalist view and the mythical/spiritual view are two poles of my psychological constitution. They are opposed, yet indivisible like the poles of a magnet. I feel as though I wouldn't be my whole self without either. The Bible, the Greek myths, Norse mythology and the King Arthur stories and all foundational cultural touchstones for me. Their influence is everywhere, and I don't need to be a believing Christian to appreciate the influence of the Bible, any more than I need to believe in Zeus and Odin to appreciate the cultural contribution of their mythologies.

A lot of anomalies invoke Christian religious sentiment in our culture, I’ve been around co-workers who simply had no idea what people were talking about

There was yet another preacher convinced they had mathematically determined when the rapture would be and that it was “surprisingly” a nearby upcoming date and his flock was selling their possessions. Watching my co-workers giggle after the explanation was entertaining.

But you can really be out of the loop

The bible is by far the most translated text (and a reasonably sized one). I just wish it wasn't written in a weird way.

I learned a little bit of Korean by reading the bible as the primary source and when I tried to speak, I only got weird looks. I get why. It is like someone asking you "How art thou?"

I tried something similar to learn Samoan, but didn't get far. I would compare some phrases in English and Samoan, then ask native speakers what a confusing word meant. I stopped pretty quickly because I found that a phrase made of three words might mean "tree", but if you just take the first word alone it means something extremely vulgar (I couldn't get anyone to tell me what).

Think in syllables and that's not terribly unlike English.

Country Farmer

"So, I know what tree and farmer mean ..."

I find it a bit weird that people stick with such antiquated translations of the bible in English. The German translations are pretty much standard German. Even the Luther Bible is quite readable to this day.

There's always some friction when it comes to updating translations (source: I used to have to go to church, there was much debate whether or not to replace the archaic translation with a modern version). A lot of debate is about whether the translation is correct (compared to the old version), and people read the bible so often they are used to the old translation - if the new one changes some words, or even changes the meaning (to be a more accurate translation), people get a bit antsy.

But yeah, the old translation is becoming nearly incomprehensible now; compare the King James version of the ten commandments with the new translations: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20&versi... vs https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20&versi...

The KJV version of the Ten Commandments is still easily comprehensible. You only need to know a few archaic constructions ("spake" instead of "spoke," "thou" instead of "you"), which most native speakers of English are probably reasonably familiar with.

Looking at the Luther Bible, it has a similar number of archaic constructs as the KJV. For example, it uses archaic forms of the genitive case extensively (compare Luther's "der Väter Missetat" with the modern German equivalent, "die Missetat der Väter").

The reason people like these old translations, in my view, is that the slightly archaic language separates them from the common language we use in our everyday lives. That separates the book from the "profane" or mundane everyday world, and makes it something special. Even as a cynical atheist, I appreciate the feeling that this sort of slightly archaic language creates.

1. The Ten Commandments in the Luther Bible: https://www.bibel-online.net/buch/luther_1912/2_mose/20/#1

Didn't Orwell have a point when he contrasted a verse from the KJ version (antiquated!) bible with his own modern (' a parody but not a very gross one') version.

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

Doubtless someone can provide a much better modern version but why bother?

Amazing that the original was the product of fifty people.

I'm not a native English speaker. To me, your first excerpt is much more understandable: I can automatically form the abstraction given these examples, whereas the second excerpt, although more general, is honestly harder to "hammer" into the brain. But I think that is because the second version is not just modern language, but also more abstract.

That was the point being made by both Orwell and parent commenter. The KJV is, for all it's archaisms, incredibly 'punchy' in a way that really can't be improved on. You could try, but you're only going to ever get a fraction of the way there, and in the end would only amount to a revision that nobody would accept.

Try your hand at easier fare, like say Shakespeare.

I see, thanks for the clarification.

I agree that this is what's being expressed, but I think I'd have an easier time revising KJV than Shakespeare. The pieces of translated bible that I have read didn't come anywhere near the complexities of Shakespeare. I don't think anyone would read/accept my revision, but I think it would be more beautiful in the eyes of most English professors.

"I returned. Under the sun I saw that the race was not for the swift, nor the battle for the strong, nor the riches for the wise men; time and chance affected all."

Not a major departure, and it could certainly be improved upon, but it's more to the point while still showing the reader rather than just stating the point, and the repetitious bit in the middle has been paired down to three parts with a slight variation on the last repetion upending expectations while not going so off the rails that there is no particular expectation.

There is a lot of crufty old stuff in Shakespeare, the stories are re-written pretty much yearly pretty much all omitting this stuff. I'm not a part of that world, but I'd be pretty surprised if theater companies that regularly run Shakespeare plays weren't revising the plays in that regard.

I believe that Shakespeare had more rhyme and meter than the bible. I also believe that text with more rhyme and meter is more difficult to edit without damaging these qualities, while text with less rhyme and meter has less to damage by these metrics and is therefore easier to edit. Do you agree with both of these statements? If so, do you think the bible has other complexities Shakespeare lacks which outweigh the complexity added by Shakespeare's rhyme and meter? If so, what are those qualities?

Oh dear I'm certainly not prepared to dive that deep into the topic. I was more referring to the content rather than the specific qualities of the verse. The Bible is surprisingly hard to compress. Shakespeare, well you can make two hour long movies that hit all the story beats.

As a counterpoint, I'm a native English speaker, and I found the second much easier to understand, whereas the first seemed like a maze.

As a former hard-core Bible reader, but never a fan of the KJV, I found the first easier. But I think that could be because it follows closely to the patterns of the Zen Buddhist literature I'm reading lately. 'cuz it does read kind of like a Zen koan.

I don't think it's weird, in fact I think it's very interesting and telling of the world we live in. After all you could make the same argument for the Bible in Latin, why did the catholic church stick with it up until less than a century ago? And let's not even mention the Quran or Vedic Sanskrit.

The USA is now the world's superpower, English is its language and it's become the de-facto lingua franca of the world, a new Latin. But all that is fresh and new, in the grand scheme of things. Religions and cultures call for relics, for heritage, for proofs that there's something greater than a sum of people living in the same place at the same time.

The King James Bible is one of these artifacts. It's the one true bible for our Anglocentric world and like the Latin of the catholic church it's probably going to outlive the language it's been written in by a long margin (unless of course the USA manage to collapse before that and some other civilization takes over).

Besides that, there's clearly a certain fascination for overly formal and/or outdated English in the American psyche. Look at how Received Pronunciation is so popular in American media (especially in fantasy, but not only) even though it's effectively only used by a small minority of mostly British and Indian speakers.

It also has a lot of timeless wisdom

It is almost impossible to imagine that the writings of any long-lived society would not have ample quantities of "timeless wisdom". In fact it would be striking and unusual if it were otherwise.

Much wisdom can be difficult to stumble upon but is self-evident once known. Long-lived societies are sure to import all such wisdom from around them, then discover more for themselves over time.

Exactly. I'm pretty sure one can find "lots of timeless wisdom" in the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Norse Prose Edda and Poetic Edda, the Necronomicon, etc., etc.

especially in the age of limited literacy and scribal skills, I'm not sure people would have invested much time in copying and archiving ideas and texts they thought were garbage. this is sort of a literary survivorship bias at play, it would seem.

Yes. But the Necronomicon is one of two things (depending on what you're talking about): A fictional grimoire, or a piece of fiction (a hoax, even).

I know, throwing that in was my lame attempt at humor. :-)

You're right; the main way that the bible (and by extension religion) is important in this regard is that it's survived, in various forms, for as long as it has. I kinda believe you need a religion to preserve knowledge and wisdom like this for so long.

I mean tangentially related, a while ago there was an article about how to safeguard nuclear waste storage for the next 100.000 years; one suggestion was to create a religion around it and its preservation. Something that can survive an intellectual step backwards. (Not unheard of; see the Greek and Roman societies of old. Their knowledge was lost for a long time, but Christianity survived. Of course their knowledge getting lost may be related to the rise of Christian religions as well)

> I kinda believe you need a religion to preserve knowledge and wisdom like this for so long.

Depends on how high you set the bar for 'survive'.

We have a few of the writing of Euclid, Archimedes and other Greeks, and mostly they weren't preserved for religious reasons.

Religion was certainly an effective carrier for stories prior to the age of the printing press. Unfortunately most religions lose the ability to adapt and error correct, which means that they end up stalling progress as surely as they preserve it.

I was going to post some parts of the old testament that could be deemed the opposite of wisdom, but here we try to avoid flame-wars so I ask for the same level of self-restrain from you when using adjetives about such controversial topics.

I ask for the same level of self-restrain from you when using adjetives about the quality of the bible and similar kind of opinions.

Note that the person you're replying to did not say that the bible was ALL timeless wisdom, or really say much at all about the overall quality of the bible.

There's no contradiction between the bible containing lots of timeless wisdom AND containing lots of utter nonsense and complete bollocks.

Even as somebody who is an atheist and who generally finds religion to be a blight on our society, I think one can find "timeless wisdom" in the bible mixed in with the other stuff. Whether that, on balance, makes it worth investing time in or not is another question.

Yeah, New Testament is a fair bit nicer.

Much of the Old Testament can be read as a collection of stories about a small tribe becoming a nation and fighting for their survival over hundreds of years. The stories are interesting not always because they are nice but also often because they are not. Not everyone portrayed there is a hero.

Then again, that is probably how it was and when I read the old viking stories they are equally - if not more violent.

I have also enjoyed reading both the Viking age Håvamål as well as the ancient Proverbs (as well as a number of other sources).

Though as I recall the old testament has more quotably poetic one-liners.

That is kind of a myth. For example the concept of Hell and eternal punishment is from the NT.

It's not a myth. It's the opinion of most people who have read them (including me).

However, many would say the entire compilation is a myth.

Can you point out where it mentions eternal punishment? AIR from my reading I see absolute destruction vs living with God, but not Dante's inferno by a long shot.

https://www.christianity.com/wiki/heaven-and-hell/what-is-he... has a good overview with references in the bible to how Hell is described; in short, it's dark, gnashing of teeth, fire, and separation from God.

The New Testament surely mentions that even Jesus "descended into hell" before his resurrection (practically spending some days there):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrowing_of_Hell

Catholic church takes care explain that officially (1):

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p122...

Some people find that inconvenient.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catechism

Well Dante is a completely different thing, but the NT describes eternal suffering in fire e.g. in the story of Lazarus and the rich man. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+16%3A19-31...

so, uh, you probably weren't aware of this (I know I wasn't until fairly recently when I made a similar comment and a jewish friend pointed this out) but many jewish people consider speaking casually about how the new testament is good/ the old testament is bad to be pretty offensive. The gist I think of what my friend was telling me was that if I took the time to understand the jewish scripture, all of the stuff about loving your neighbor, feeding the poor, etc... is already in those jewish scriptures that prefigured the new testament- I mean, that's just scriptural interpretation, which I am not really qualified to get into - but the offensive bit is that casually dismissing the old testament as bad while praising the new testament as good can come off like saying "the religion my ancestors had has a more moral holy book than the religion your ancestors had" and it's pretty easy to see how that could give offense.

(I mean, I'm not a bible scholar; just... it was, you know, one of those times when I unintentionally gave offense, and seems like something you should be aware of if you are trying to avoid flame wars.)

>"like saying "the religion my ancestors had has a more moral holy book than the religion your ancestors had" and it's pretty easy to see how that could give offense."

What if it's true though?

The problem you have is that the converse would be objectionable to Christians as you'd be saying God's new covenant achieved nothing.

Eh, it sounded like the person I was responding to was trying to avoid flames? I mean, if you are trying to get into it about religion, that's a different thing.

I'm just saying this was something I stepped in by accident and that you should be aware of it.

Such as?

I'm struggling to imaging something recorded in this draft that is useful, and not already known?

A lot of timeless wisdom is also obvious.

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

It’s obvious exactly because it has been already incorporated as values in our societies.

> A lot of timeless wisdom is also obvious.

As another commenter said, it seems obvious to you because it's been incorporated into our culture.

For instance, I lived in Turkey for a few months, and I had a Turkish roommate who was a devout Muslim. He gave me an English translation of the Qur'an to read, and I gave him a Turkish translation of the New Testament. He decided he would come and show me the places where it must have been changed (since Islam teaches that Jesus was a prophet, but what he says in the New Testament obviously doesn't match what Mohammad said).

What was the first place he found that was obviously changed? Matthew 5:38-39: "You have heard it said, 'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them on the other cheek also."

Well, there's a good example for you: Either that seems like good advice, in which case you certainly got that from your culture; or it doesn't, in which case it's worth chewing over to get some wisdom out of it. :-)

That reminds me of a surprisingly popular argument against religion which goes something like, "God is supposed to be good, but look, this part of the Bible disagrees with my cultural norms."

What did he suggest was changed about it?

So this is literally 20 years ago now (plus or minus a month) we had this conversation, and I'm not sure I 100% understood what he thought even then.

What he said was something like that Islam says that when you're attacked, you should be strong defend yourself; and maybe let the other person know that you're not weak. So I guess he thought that this contradicted what Allah said elsewhere (through Mohammed), and therefore couldn't have been said by Jesus (since Jesus also spoke for Allah); and so must have been added in by someone later.

(To be clear, trying to repeat what I remember he said, not making any claims about what Islam does or doesn't teach.)

The thing is, the whole reason Jesus' statement stands out is because it does contradict our natural ideas about the right way to react. I can understand someone adding in fake stories about miracles or fake claims to be divine; but why would you add in fake teaching that's so counter-intuitive -- and on the face of it, so... pathetic?

His question honestly caught me off-guard; I was expecting him to bring up claims of Jesus' divinity, or his death and resurrection. "Turn the other cheek" is so firmly established in our culture as one template for "how good religious people behave" (a la Ned Flanders from the Simpsons) that it wouldn't have occurred to me that people would consider it "false teaching".

And because I was caught off-guard, I didn't ask him how he thought it came to be that way in the first place. Probably he hadn't thought that far. :-)

Thanks! I can understand where your friend is coming from. I think if you polled most Christians (a least most that I know) you would find that most of them believe it is fine to defend oneself or at least take oneself out of harms way. So even though 'turn the other cheek' is such a common phrase in our culture and most Christians are well aware of this saying by Jesus, they don't interpret it literally. Most would say it means to forgive those who do evil towards you and not take revenge against them. I think the original saying has some cultural connotation of a strike on the cheek being more of an insult than a physical attack, but I a not an expert. (Though this article supports this idea: http://learntheology.com/turn-the-other-cheek.html)

Now, in Muslim culture (I am again not an expert) it may be that they teach a more strict sense of a right to take revenge/justice on those that do them harm?

> So even though 'turn the other cheek' is such a common phrase in our culture and most Christians are well aware of this saying by Jesus, they don't interpret it literally.

Jesus often says things hyperbolically to shock people enough to get them to think outside their boxes. It's a bit like that quote from Suits: “What are your choices when someone puts a gun to your head? ... You take the gun, or you pull out a bigger one. Or, you call their bluff. Or, you do any one of a hundred and forty six other things.”

In certain cultures, if you're insulted or attacked, people feel like they basically have to respond in kind. But this sets up a cycle of violence: someone attacks you, you "have" to attack them; but then they "have" to attack you back, and so on until one of you is more or less destroyed. (Furious 7 probably unintentionally demonstrated this perfectly: both the main hero and the main villain were revenging attacks done by the other on their own family.)

Saying "Turn the other cheek" is basically along the same lines as the gun quote: "What are your choices when someone smacks you in the face? ... How about this: You turn the other cheek. Or you ignore it and move on. Or, you do any one of a hundred and forty six other things. You don't have to respond in violence."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com