The Bible as Literature

I've never read the bible before. How many versions are there? or am i mistaken?

tyrius, there are several versions of the Bible:King James--New International--Living Bible--and the New Revised Standard. The King James I prefer because of the Shakespearian type language.

Why are they so many different versions?

because someone must have thought that the average person couldn't read and interpret without help. The particular one of which I speak is The Layman's Parallel Bible.

Are each version different as in some exluding and some including certain passages?

I would say,Tyrius, that it's more distortion than clarification

Who writes all of these versions any way? and why are they trying to make it harder to understand than it needs to be?

Tyrius - the King James version came about in the reign of King james I of England (and VI of Scotland!).

England had not that long been established finally as a Protestant country (it settled under James' predecessor, Elizabeth I).

It was felt that the new Church of England needed a new and definitive Bible translation - the Bible having not been very accessible to lay people under the Roman catholicism of the time - and usually, I suppose (?), read in Latin.

The resultant translation - couched in the magnificent language of Elizabethan/Jacobean England - (the language of Shakespeare, Donne etc) - is a thing of great literary beauty, most people agree. It is now often studied in English Literature courses for this reason. However, it is now nearly 400 years old - and many people find the language hard to understand - so new editions of the bible, in modern English, have come about. Many translators also wish to correct translation errors in the King James version.

Letty - Genesis is pretty spectacular! I also love the passage (Paul, I believe?) beginning "Though I speak with the tongue of men and of Angels" etc - about charity...

The Bible is beautifully written which is why trying to watch some Cecil B. DeMille Biblical epic where the language is paraphrased into schmuck English, it is good for a laugh.

I love the language of the prophets--especially Isaiah!--as did Martin Luther King, Jr. It's what made his speeches so amazing!

King James for me, for literary beauty!

Deb and Mr. Wizard. You are both so right. The beauty of the language is still fantastic and regardless of how it becomes juggled for the sake of box office or control, it is timeless. Yes, Deb that particular passage is from Paul. One of my favorites, too. From the nether regions of my mind I am trying to recall the entire context of "....through a glass darkly..."

Hmmm - part of "when I was a child, I thought as a child, I spake as a child.....something something put away childish things ...... then I saw as through a glass darkly....." Shoulda kept me school bible!

Ah, dupre. Testing my memory about Isaiah:

"...There shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse,
and a flower shall rise up out of his root..."Wow!

Deb..that's it! Get that book out from under the dusty tomes of childhood!

Mr. Wizard, Just thought of Ingmar Bergman's movie "Through a Glass Darkly". My Gawd. I never understood one bit of that movie.

Not one of his more accessible films, that's for sure. "The Virgin Spring" gets rather murky in the dialogue at times as well as "The Magician" (although in that film the idea is what is real and what is magic).
The scripts are all written in a prose that rivals the Bible -- the sound of the Swedish being spoken by all of his very skilled actors is quite beautiful, especially in "Wild Stawberries."