Slashdot Mirror
In The Beginning & The Keys of Egypt
Hieroglyphs The Keys Of Egypt was written by husband-and-wife archaeological team Lesley and Roy Adkins. It is subtitled "The Race to Crack the Hieroglyph Code," and starts with a short chapter that introduces the eventual winner of that race, the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion, and mentions his most serious rival, the Englishman Thomas Young.
The book goes on to examine Napoleon's expedition to Egypt which both brought the Rosetta Stone to light and started a period of French and European fascination with ancient Egypt. These were the two catalysts for the riddle's eventual solution.
This is a well-written book that looks at the struggle and race for translation and the political and academic machinations (often both combined) that surrounded Champollion. It is essentially a biography of Champollion, who grew up and worked amid the turmoil of the Napoleonic era. The story is a compelling one and the authors have done well to make it at times fascinating.
As a genre I find that 'scientific biographies' tend to be a little overblown and flowery, the writing not quite precise -- and Keys suffers from these shortcomings. I also felt that while the book is subtitled "The Race to Crack the Hieroglyph Code" it really only focuses on Champollion, while he is the eventual winner a little more effort in examining the others involved in the effort would have improved the book.
The Bible It can be argued that the King James Bible has had as large an effect on our language today as the work of Shakespeare. 'In The Beginning' has at its core the story of biblical translation, a topic you may think anything but fascinating. McGrath has done a good job in making this a compelling book.He starts, as one may expect, with the story of Gutenberg and his first printed bibles. Before arriving at the King James he covers Martin Luther, the rise of Protestantism in Europe, Henry the Eighth, more than one hanging, and several other bible translations and translators. Along the way he manages to dispel a few myths I had held about biblical translation and the King James in particular. I always thought that it was the King James version that introduced the idea of the main body in roman type and words inserted to clarify meaning in italics, but it was actually an earlier English translation known as the Geneva Bible that first implemented this idea. After explaining the technology, theology, politics and linguistics nuances that led King James to permit (but not fund) a new translation, McGrath tells us how the translation was accomplished organizationally before examining some of the nuances of the translation itself. Some of the language in the King James was archaic even when it was published; translators had been instructed to lift from previous translations all the way back to the partial translation of William Tynsdale published 90 years earlier, and this at a time when the English language was going through the huge changes of the Elizabethan era. McGrath examines this aspect, pointing out such things as changes in verb endings and personal pronouns.
I found the book patchy. McGrath does a much better job covering the story up until the translation. It is harder to get a feel for how the translation was accomplished and how the various teams worked, and when he comes to examine some of the nuances of the translation, the text makes much harder going. If this had not been a part of the topic that interested me a great deal, I may have lost interest.
ConclusionBoth books may have their flaws but both are well worth the read. It is important to realise the history of science and language that have brought us to our current place and both these volumes do a good job of illuminating the past efforts of men who worked under entirely different pressures than we find today.
You can purchase both In The Beginning and The Keys of Egypt from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
If you're intersted in decypherments you should look at John Chadwick's Decipherment of Linear B and more recent literature on that topic, a stunning intellectual feat done without the benefit of any Rosetta Stone.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
A shame. The King James Bible was almost certainly based on his translation. I've seen estimates that as much as 80% of the King James Bible was actually his work.
Like so many great reformers, he was put to death. His last known letter before he died is especially tragic to read.
The Tyndale Society
Has anyone in the last couple of decades attempted a translation from the oldest possible sources for the Bible's contents?
While I'm sure it would piss off a few here and there (see what happened with Jewish scholars when those scrolls were translated a while back) it would be interesting to compare a direct translation based on modern understanding to the more popular current versions that have passed through multiple interpretations through multiple cultural lenses.
In university, I was an Enlgish major with a habit of studying other languages - specifically, French, Russian and Old Icelandic. Studying human languages, you quickly realize that there are many ways to express the same abstractions - a realization that has helped me as a programmer.
Yeah, the review could have been better. I would have like to known more about some of the linguistic problems sovled on both books.
Not that I'm an atheist or anything, but I've been developing a feeling off late, that religion was introduced in ancient times as a deterrent against perceived immoral/harmful behavior. In the absence of effective law-enforcement agencies, the best way to encourage people to act peacefully/etc was to lay down a set of rules of "acceptable behaviour" and make it known that breach of the rules would result in punishment in the form of hell or alternately reward in the form of heaven.
I think the world has developed enough now, that we no longer need religion as a deterrent. It serves more as a tool for discrimination/fanaticism, rather than what it was intended for.
Not sure if there are other people who've thought along these lines...who knows, I may be the ONE :)
*wears Matrix goggles and gets back to work*
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Keirkegaard, Satre and Camus for IP infringement, at least for a start.
I told pharaoh to use Pretty Good Pharaoh Privacy on those damn cartouches. France was just a mote in Isis's eye at the time, but even then I knew they would turn out to be nothing but troublemakers.
One thing to note are the political motivations behind the translation of the King James Bible. This translation was mandated to be used in all Church of England services, IIRC. It was instrumental in helping King James wrest control of England from the Catholic church to the Church of England (controlled by the monarch, i.e. James himself). This gave the British monarchy significantly more power in their own country, as well as preventing such a large portion of the funds from being diverted to the Vatican.
As a spiritual and literary work, the King James Bible has had an immense impact on western culture. It has also had a large impact on Great Britain, and, in turn, its many former colonies. Mute your sound beforehand, but there are some interesting articles about King James and the period here.
www.clarke.ca
I found the following book to be very interesting as it describs many of the people involved in the King James Version of the Bible in detail.
_God's Secretaries : The Making of the King James Bible_
by Adam Nicolson
Unfortunately I haven't read the book the poster discusses so I cannot make a comparison.
Well, I personally think its unfair to start the history of the bible at the time of the printing press. A Grand Funk Electric song captures this best - "You've got the English translation of the Roman translation of the Greek translation of the pure Babylonian". Indeed, the King James translation of the Bible is one of many English translations of the Bible. Starting one's Bible history from ca. 1450 (when the Bible first began being pressed) simply does not seem fair to me.
The first translations were made ca. 200 BC, and was the "Septuagint" - from Hebrew to Greek translation (the Old Testament). It was not until ca. 400 AD that the Hebrew version of the Old Testament was translated into Latin; the New Testament was translated from Greek to Latin -- the Old Testament was re-translated. The manuscripts on which these translations were based are no longer present in the whole.
In my opinion, there is a rich history to be told in the differences between translations of the Bible from original to later versions. Hell, one could back into European translations of the Bible and teach an entire story based upon the discrepancies of copies of the hand-written versions.
There's a rich history to the translation of the Bible. Google for it.
www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
On a related note, people interested in these books may be interested in this story (via metafilter) about how the Qu'ran as it's known now may be a mistranslation of the original.
There's also a rich history to the development of the Egyptian writing style of hieroglyphics throughout the entirety of the Egyptian era. Indeed, the Rosetta Stone, the key to the translation of the hieroglyphics was written using no less than three different scripts of hieroglyphics. More information about the Rosetta Stone is available here.
www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
KJV is not even a little 'responsible for the inversion of "thee/thou/thy."' It was using these in the familiar sense, which was the sense used in the greek original of the NT, and thus was REINFORCING the original connotation of these words rather than inverting it...
m l
o st -recent/msg10071.html
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/m971211c.ht
http://www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-m
http://www.bartleby.com/61/66/Y0026600.html
http://www.kencollins.com/why-05.htm
Pfft...everybody knows the bible came down from heaven in Renaissance era English way back in the day. Imagine the trouble Moses had trying to explain the Ten Commandments without knowing what language they were in! Fortunately, God guided our language in such a way that we are today able to read it.
The idea that the words of the bible changed to English from some heathen language is an evil LIE and work of the Devil! Everybody knows that Jesus was and his disciples were English speaking white men! Haven't you seen the movie! and TBN! They couldn't possibly be wrong!
You also have to look at history to gain understanding and context of why certain church events are placed where they were. Christmas was moved to the winter in order to combat a popular winter occult festival. Not only that, but remember that during the early formation of the Christian church, Rome was in the heydey of its power. The Jewish/Christian problems with self-image and body issues are a direct result of trying to turn away from "matters of the flesh" which Rome so famously embodied. But remember that religion has always been used as a dividing force: Christians in Venice rounded up Jews and placed them into a ghetto long before Hitler did this, and for many of the same reasons: fear of the other. I like to think that there is a divide: faith is from God/Deity/etc and good, while religion is a human construct that is more often than naught fsked up and twisted.
I don't think this lessens my christian belief - it just adds context and deepens the reasons.
Please email all complaints to root@127.0.0.1 and the issue will be dealt with in due time.
It's perhaps an old urban legend that William Shakespear (spelled here without the terminal 'e', both spellings seem to be around) was consulted on the poetry of the Psalms. Presented as evidence:
KJV Psalm 46Note that 4+6 = 10, the number of letters in Shakespear. Count to the 46th word from the beginning, you see "shake" and the 46th word from the end (excluding the "Selah", a musician notation, IIRC) you have "spear"...
I'd love to find out if the Bard really did have a hand in it... which one might hope this book would...
...just sliced your reply in two.
Sorry, but when faced with the two choices of:
(a) There is a god, and he caused the creation of religion
and
(b) There is no god, and religion is an institution that has its roots in superstition and social control
One has to make the most likely choice given the evidence at hand. Most logical, lucid people who discount that which cannot be proven find themselves coming to logical conclusions.
It amazes me how some people (not necessarily you) will suspend the very logic which they use in every other aspect of their life just for the chance to believe in something or someone that, for all intents and purposes, doesn't exist.
A man comes up on a priest banging his head against the wall -- clearly frustrated. The man asks him, "what's wrong?"
The man, who has been celibate all his life, replies, "We just retranslated the oldest manuscript available. The word is 'celebrate'!"
The point being that of all possible documents you could hold a copy of in your own language, a modern translation of the Bible is about as close to the closest possible meaning in your language of the meaning in language 0 of document 0 as you could possibly have of any text of similar origin and antiquity.
And all that without invoking a single phrase of mumbo jumbo...in saecula saeculorum Amen, Amen
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
There are a number of issues at hand here. First, it's important to realize that copies of the GNT are generally compiled from multiple sources using the available documents. Where there exists doubt or variation among the documents, these are footnoted and referenced in the text. Within the Nestle-Aland 26th edition, approximately 1/4-1/3 of each page is taken up by those footnotes. The vast majority of those are very simple changes. For instance:
Opening pretty randomly to Mark 7:7, we see "mataen de sebontai me, didaskontes didaskalias * entalmata anthropwn", which roughly translates as "But in vain do they worship me, teaching (as) teachings (the) doctrines of man", with the words in () added for clarity. If we examine the footnote * (actually an upside down T, but whatever.), we find that P45 (papyrus #45, a 3rd century manuscript in Austria) inserts "Kai" into that space. Kai means "And", leaving us with "But in vain do they worship me, teaching teachings and doctrines of men." The change is at best subtle, and has little to no effect on the meaning of the text. The great majority of notations are similar to this one.
There are some that are more problematic, such as John 1:27, however. "o opisw mou epxomenos, ou ouk eimi egw agios ina lusw autou ton imanta tou upodaematos." Roughly "The after me one is coming, (and) I am not worthy to loose the strap of his sandle." But the footnote adds "ekeinos umas baptizei en pneumati agio kai puri." to the end of the verse, which roughly menas "He (was appointed?) baptize you with the holy spirit and with fire. ()'s in this case indicate that I'm unsure of that translation and don't have the leisure time to verify it at the moment. However, this addition occurs in a single sixth century copy of the Gospels, and is likely cross contamination from Matthew 3 where a similar wording is used.
Much of the talk that the existing manuscripts are "corrupted" is largely a waste of breath. If they are, and I'll gladly hold that they could be, the other manuscripts are noted and the reader is able to review the evidence for themselves. Obviously the editors of NA26 had to make some judgement calls, but the information is always available to double check their scholarship and make one's own call.
One classic example of the scholarship issues with those who hold that the KJV is from an uncorrupted manuscript occurs in Acts 8:37. Go look it up in the NIV. You'll find it as a footnote, at best. In the KJV it's a part of the accepted text. Now why is this? It's because between the translation of the KJV and the NIV earlier manuscripts were uncovered and studied. The earliest occurance of verse 37 in the text is found around the 6th century AD. Manuscripts before that time make no mention of those words at all. Advances in archaeology and scholarship have resulted in clarifications of the original text.
Hope that's helpful!