The Great Bible Review

You can help this project

There are many ways how you can help this Bible review project:

[ 1 ] Find some of the missing Bible translations in a library. The page of Bible translations lists 282 Bible versions, which are not included in this review yet, because they are not available online for free. You can help to add some of them into this review, if you search for them in the database of your local library or university library. This will cost you nothing, but it might take 3 hours of your time to check all the missing translations in a library database.

Some of the rarest Bible versions, which I have listed on the page of translations that are still missing from the review, are not for sale at any price. Several such Bible versions are at risk of being forever lost from the heritage of english Bible translations, if only a small number of relatively modern printed books exist in the bookshelves of unknown persons, who may not believe that anyone would buy such a physically unimpressive book. SKJVTRA is an example of such translations, despite the fact that probably thousands of physical copies exist of this Bible version. LENNART is a 20th-century translation of the New Testament, of which only one handwritten copy has ever existed, but its owners certainly cherish it dearly.

An even more endangered species are Bible translations that were published on the internet only, and the website is no longer active, and the Wayback Machine has not stored a copy of the full Bible text. The original author might be the only person who still possesses a copy of the full Bible text, if the author is still alive. YHVHNAM and YHVHCIN are examples of many such translations.

I have not saved for myself a copy of the full text of the Bibles that are included in this review. I am not planning to found an archive or museum of english Bible translation texts. Such an effort would require the financial resources and long-term dedication of a university or other similar institution.

[ 2 ] Buy some of the missing Bible translations. This would take some money, but not much time, if you buy some of the missing Bible translations for yourself, so that you can share the 8 test verses with the editor of this review. The cheapest translations cost 10 – 20 EUR or USD, while the most expensive ones cost several thousands.

[ 3 ] Remake this review of Bibles in english language. If you have 200 hours of spare time, and sufficient skills in biblical hebrew and greek, you can do this review better than I have done it. You may have thought about this already, if you have read the review a bit: “He has made so many wrong decisions. I could do it better.” You are welcome to do this review better. If I can find 9 people to remake this review, using their own personal judgment, what they believe to be the correct decision and fair amount of deviation points in each scenario, then we would have the total sum of 10 subjective opinions, instead of only one subjective opinion. This would be as close to objectivity as is possible to achieve in a review of this kind.

[ 4 ] Make a review of Bible translations in another language. I will probably not review Bibles in other languages, because I have many other projects that take a lot of time. (See points 5 and 6 below.) If someone else will review the accuracy of Bibles in another language, using a similar method as I use in this review, and including (at least) the same 8 test verses, the data of their review would be comparable with my data. Then it would be possible to compare the accuracy of Bible translations also in different languages.

I can help you to understand the methods that I use, but you would need a lot of spare time for this cause. Reviewing 8 verses can easily take 1 - 2 hours per translation. If the Bible has been translated 50 times into your language, reviewing them can take 50 - 100 hours.

Your first task would be to make a list of all translations that have been made into your language, ever in history. There are lists of Bible translations in Wikipedia and some other places, but such lists are usually incomplete. It may never be possible to be sure that your list is 100 % complete, because some persons may have done Bible versions that are not widely known.

Then you would need to collect sample texts of those translations, for the test verses. This may require some money, because not all translations are available online for free. A personal visit to a national library may give you free access to nearly everything that has ever been published professionally in your country.

[ 5 ] Participate in the development of the greek text BYZR or the hebrew texts WLCR and WLCRA. It would be nice to publish some complete books of the Bible, or eventually the whole Bible, in these text formats, but this would require a lot of work and time.

Converting the standard BYZ text (Byzantine Textform 2018) of the New Testament into BYZR style is the easier of these two tasks. (If you prefer Textus Receptus, don’t worry: all significant text variants will be indicated in the text.) The standard greek text can be automatically stripped of traditional accent marks and converted into the romanized GC-RZ-P text format, which I prefer to use as the master text. Human proof-reading is then necessary to verify that the automatically defined pronunciation variant of some letters is correct (e.g. ypsilon and gamma). It is also necessary to modernize and internationalize the punctuation and capitalization, slightly de-hellenize the ortography of hebrew proper nouns, and recognize cases where a word has a different meaning than its most common meaning, to mark such words with accent marks that are designed for this purpose. These are the main objectives of the BYZR text style, compared to traditional manuscripts of the greek New Testament.

In BYZR, WLCR and WCLRA I try to pay careful attention to scenarios where it is significant but uncertain, which thoughts are intended to be continuous and which thoughts strongly separated from each other. I use a double colon :: as punctuation in such places, while the traditional editions of hebrew and greek manuscripts use punctuation that sometimes affirms one possible interpretation, and excludes another possible interpretation.

Processing the WLCR and WCLRA texts will be a heavier task, and also the total amount of text is three times greater. The traditional WLC text of the hebrew Tanakh (Westminster Leningrad Codex, version UXLC 2.0 2023) can be automatically converted into all-lowercase transliterated HE-RZ-P text. Human proof-reading is then necessary to choose which words are capitalized, and to modernize the punctuation, convert all ceremonial pausal forms into typical word forms, and write the intentionally misspelled name of God as Yahweh (which might be an incorrect spelling too, but at least it is not intentionally incorrect).

All greek manuscripts of the New Testament were written until the 8th century with all-uppercase letters, “majuscules” or “uncials”. Lowercase greek letters “minuscules” were invented in the 9th century. During the next 100 years it became increasingly popular to write New Testament manuscripts with all-lowercase letters, until someone perceived the possibility of adding clarity to the text by using uppercase letters at the start of phrases, later also in proper nouns. The 10th-century manuscript GA 82 is one of the first documents to use this new innovation (if such features in the document were not added in a later period, by writing uppercase letters over some letters that were originally lowercase). The first english New Testaments in the 14th century use all-lowercase text (for example WYE1353), but uppercase letters became the norm at the start of phrases and in some proper nouns already before the end of the same century, for example in WYE138C.

Nowadays practically all editions of the greek New Testament use modern western conventions in punctuation and in uppercase and lowercase letters, typically following the stylistic guidelines of english language. I plan to do the same with the Bible text of the hebrew Tanakh — 1000 years after it became popular in manuscripts of the greek New Testament — but using a unified international style in punctuation and capitalization, which is closer to the stylistic guidelines of french and spanish than english. This style is described further below a bit more.

When the WLCR text will be ready for a verse or chapter, the amplified WCLRA text can be created by adding words (in italics or square brackets), which help the modern reader to understand what the ancient Bible text says, without modifying the Bible text itself. The outcome will not be a “modern hebrew translation“ of the Tanakh text, but rather a modern annotated version of the ancient Tanakh text.

[ 6 ] Participate in the development of a very literal Bible translation SAMPLET and a more relaxed SAMPLEP, in english or some other language such as spanish, french, german, arabic, hebrew, russian, swedish or finnish.

There are many precise translations in english, as you can see in this review, so the english version of SAMPLET cannot be revolutionary in the art of literalness. Some other major world languages do not have a strictly literal and form-faithful translation in modern language, or in the language of any era. Perfect form-faithulness is not even possible in some major world languages, because of a grammar that leaves the verb tenses more ambiguous than is acceptable in a strictly literal Bible translation. In such languages as hebrew, arabic or russian a strictly form-faithful translation of the New Testament will need to use standardized (and hopefully not very inconvenient) expressions to indicate some verb tenses more precisely than the standard grammar allows in these languages.

Ordinary people have already invented some such expressions. For example, “qad kataba” means “has written” in unofficial colloquial arabic, while the official grammar of arabic does not have such a verb tense. (Hebrew and russian grammars do not have this verb tense either.) Ordinary users of the language have seen the need for such a verb tense, and various persons have probably tried many different ways how to express it, until this innovation has gained popularity and become the unofficial norm. The makers of strictly literal Bible translations will not need to invent the perfect tense for arabic language, as ordinary people have done it already.

SAMPLEP seeks to say what the Bible says more conveniently and easily to understand, without losing or changing any of the main thoughts in the original text, and without adding any new information (except if the added information is marked with italics or square brackets). These are not unique objectives: many modern translations promise to do the same, but they may nevertheless perform quite poorly in my review of the correctness of the main thoughts.

I plan to write all these languages (and the source texts BYZR, WLCR and WCLRA) with unified international punctuation and capitalization. All text on this website is written in such a style. That is the reason why I write the names of languages with a lowercase initial, contrary to what the official english grammar says. The majority of important world languages (e.g spanish, portuguese and french) use a lowercase initial in these circumstances. Therefore the unified international style would be to write the names of languages with a lowercase initial. Also in english, or in german.

This is bad news for anyone who wishes that my german translation would write nouns with an uppercase initial. It will not, because it is not the unified international style to do so. But people will get used to it before they reach the end of page one. After 10 pages many will wonder, why anyone has ever used uppercase initials in german nouns. Uppercase letters have a useful and effective role in modern ortography, if they are used moderately, only in words that deserve special attention. If attention is called with an uppercase initial to every other word in the whole text, then the words that really deserve attention will not stand out in the text as clearly as they optimally should.

My hebrew and arabic texts will have uppercase and lowercase letters, because that is the unified international style in the modern era. This is easy to do with the romanized text versions (HE-RZ-P and AR-RZ-P), as the latin script has uppercase and lowercase letters. But how can this be done in a text version that uses the native script of hebrew or arabic? A distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters does not even exist in these scripts.

There are several possible ways how to do this. Small Caps is one of them, but there are other possibilities too. The arabic script is challenging for the concept of small caps, due to its “lowercase” visual style. (How would “small caps” look with the lowercase letters of the latin script? The idea does not work visually, if the letters have varying heights.) A small caps version of the arabic script may need to flatten the top edge of every such letter, which traditionally rises higher than bặ or yặ (apart from the dots above letters). Trimming the bottom edge of letters will not be necessary. I am exploring also other concepts than small caps, both for the hebrew and the arabic script.

[ 7 ] Participate in the development of Unicode fonts for the hebrew and arabic native scripts, which support the distinction between uppercase and lowercase. Help would be welcome from persons who have some experience in using a font development software, or who have the patience to learn using one.

[ 8 ] Read Bible texts aloud as an audio recording. If anyone is interested in this, who speaks natively some language in which Bible texts will be produced, you are welcome to help. (It is not known yet, in which languages Bible texts will be produced any time soon.)

[ 9 ] Help with the programming tasks. Many of these projects involve automatic processing of text into a different format, with the help of a computer script. It is also necessary to make a web page that has an on-screen keyboard for the various romanized and native script text standards, so that people can easily write text that contains special characters, which are not found in a standard keyboard. If I will get help in such information technology tasks, it saves my time for other purposes.

[ 10 ] Experts of russian and arabic pronunciation. Some of the standards that I use for displaying russian text indicate the pronunciation of letters such as E, O and G, which are pronounced differently in various circumstances, e.g. ḫọrọšo (хọрọшо), Peggy vidėla ĕḡo (Пеггѝ видėла ӗѓо). Also my text standards for the greek Bible text indicate the different pronunciations of ypsilon and gamma, e.g. evañgeliou (εῡαṽγελιου). The pronunciation of letters E, O and G in russian text needs to be indicated by a person who speaks russian fluently enough to know the correct pronunciation in all scenarios.

In arabic it is difficult for non-native speakers to verify the correct vowelization of rare word forms or expressions, because such sources are rare which would give the full vowelization of any arabic text. The “just Google it” method does not function in arabic, because everything that Google finds is unvowelized.

I have listed many projects above. Some of them are larger, some are smaller. History knows many Bible translators, who were able to work full-time for decades translating the Bible, thanks to the generosity of a wealthy donor. Many of them died nevertheless before their work was completed. I do these projects as a hobby in my spare time (I have a full-time job that is unrelated to religion or languages), so it is not realistic that I would complete any of these projects alone, except maybe for one or two books of the Bible. But if I find people who are interested in some of the concepts that I have described here, and who have a hundred hours of spare time to waste (or preferably a thousand hours), or who have 100,000 EUR cash to spend, then some of these concepts might become reality to the extent of the complete Bible.