Tags: Translations

Augustine said that it was profitable to study the Bible with parallel translations. On any given Sunday morning, there are multiple translations of the Bible represented in our Quest Bible Study—and that’s a good thing! This survey will help your teacher in his preparation by knowing what translations are in use in the class by what percentages of learners. Also, it will help him gauge your awareness of translations. Please answer the questions as honestly as possible.

• 2 said they didn't bring a Bible, but were using a quarterly. This means they had access to the HCSB and KJV.
• 17 members were using the NIV. Our pastor preaches from the NIV, and of course, the NIV is the most popular translation in the US, so it no surprise that almost 2/3 of the class were using this version.
• 3 were using the KJV.
• 2 were using the NASB.
• 2 were using the NLT (I didn't specify which edition in the survey).
• We had one person respond saying he was using the NCV. I know of one other person in the class who uses the NCV, but he wasn't there today.

• 15 respondents said they didn't know what translation I was using.
• 6 said that I was using the NIV.
• 3 said I was using the TNIV.
• 2 guessed I was using the KJV!
• 1 suggested the NLT
• 1 thought I was using the Message.

• NIV: 17
• NLT: 2
• KJV: 2
• NASB: 1

• KJV: 6
• NIV: 2
• NASB: 2
• HCSB 1
• NCV: 1
• NKJV: 1
• Amplified: 1
• Phillips NT: 1

• 20 of those surveyed said that if they had to replace their Bibles, they would stick with the translation they currently use.
• Two said they would switch from the NIV to the NKJV.
• One indicated a switch from the NIV to the NASB.
• One said a switch from the NIV to KJV would take place.

Tags: Translations, Bible study

Tags: Translations

Ohio Credit-Card Defendant Released on Bond After Reciting 23rd Psalm
Thursday, April 26, 2007

CINCINNATI — A man arrested Wednesday in Cincinnati got a break from a judge after passing a Bible quiz.

Eric Hine allegedly used a stolen credit card to try to buy things at a drugstore, authorities said.

When he appeared in court Wednesday morning to face a charge of receiving stolen property, his attorney described Hine as a church-goer in hopes that the judge would set a low bond.

Hamilton County Municipal Court Judge John Burlew was skeptical and asked Hine to recite the 23rd Psalm.

Hine did: all six verses. Some in the courtroom applauded.

Burlew was satisfied and released Hine on a $10,000 appearance bond, meaning he'll have to pay that amount if he doesn't show up for his next court date.

Morning Edition, April 23, 2007 · During the past week, dozens of women in southwest China have been forced to have abortions even as late as nine months into the pregnancy, according to evidence uncovered by NPR.

China's strict family planning laws permit urban married couples to have only one child each, but in some of the recent cases — in Guangxi Province — women say they were forced to abort what would have been their first child because they were unmarried. The forced abortions are all the more shocking because family planning laws have generally been relaxed in China, with many families having two children.

Liang Yage and his wife Wei Linrong had one child and believed that — like many other couples — they could pay a fine and keep their second baby. Wei was 7 months pregnant when 10 family planning officials visited her at home on April 16.

Liang describes how they told her that she would have to have an abortion, "You don't have any more room for maneuver," he says they told her. "If you don't go [to the hospital], we'll carry you." The couple was then driven to Youjiang district maternity hospital in Baise city.

"I was scared," Wei told NPR. "The hospital was full of women who'd been brought in forcibly. There wasn't a single spare bed. The family planning people said forced abortions and forced sterilizations were both being carried out. We saw women being pulled in one by one."

Tags: China

Tags: TNIV

The Benchmark: the New Oxford Annotated Study Bible (3rd Augmented Edition)

Acronyms

An overview of the NOAB

• Michael Coogan (Stonehill Coll.) a former faculty member at Harvard, Michael Coogan for many years served as the director of the Semitic Museum’s publication program. He still maintains a relationship with Harvard Museum. He is well known as a biblical archaeologist. He was involved as a critical reviewer of both the 1991 and 1999 editions of the Catholic New American Bible (whose translation team includes some Protestant scholars.)
• Marc Zvi Brettler (Brandeis) who holds a named chair and chairs the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. He was co-editor of the JSB, the author of a major textbook on Biblical Hebrew, and is well known for his teaching, which is reflected in a very nice volume he wrote called How to Read the Bible. He is a strong advocate of what he calls “Jewish sensitive” readings of the Bible.
• Carol Newsom (Emory) a faculty member at the Candler School of Theology, the author of several commentaries on Job, and co-editor of the Women’s Bible Commentary. She also actively participates in the Episcopalian Church USA.
• Pheme Perkins (Boston Coll.) is best known for her work in early Christianity. She is a former president of the Catholic Bible Association and is also active in the Society for Biblical Literature.

Notes on the NRSV translation

“Another aspect of style will be detected by readers who compare the more stately English rendering of the Old Testament with the less formal rendering adopted for the New Testament. For example, the traditional distinction between shall and will in English has been retained in the Old Testament as appropriate in rendering a document that embodies what may be termed the classic form of Hebrew, while in the New Testament the abandonment of such distinctions in the usage of the future tense in English reflects the more colloquial nature of the koine Greek used by most New Testament authors except when they are quoting the Old Testament.”

“Paraphrastic renderings have been adopted only sparingly, and then chiefly to compensate for a deficiency in the English language—the lack of a common gender third person singular pronoun. . . . The mandates from the Division [of Education and Ministry of the sponsoring organization, the National Council of Churches] specified that, in references to men and women, masculine-oriented language should be eliminated as far as this can be done without altering passages that reflect the historical situation of ancient patriarchal culture. As can be appreciated, more than once the Committee found that the several mandates stood in tension and even in conflict. The various concerns had to be balanced case by case in order to provide a faithful and acceptable rendering without using contrived English. Only very occasionally has the pronoun “he” or “him” been retained in passages where the reference may have been to a woman as well as to a man; for example, in several legal texts in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. In such instances of formal, legal language, the options of either putting the passage in the plural or of introducing additional nouns to avoid masculine pronouns in English seemed to the Committee to obscure the historic structure and literary character of the original. In the vast majority of cases, however, inclusiveness has been attained by simple rephrasing or by introducing plural forms when this does not distort the meaning of the passage. Of course, in narrative and in parable no attempt was made to generalize the sex of individual persons.”

Publication History of the NOAB

• 1962: The original Oxford Annotated Bible. Editors: Herbert May (Oberlin/Vanderbilt) and Bruce Metzger (Princeton). The version had the flavor of an “official annotated” version of the RSV – May and Metzger were the Chair and Vice-Chair of the RSV contributions were received from the chair of the RSV committee (Luther Weigle, Yale). Metzger was a leading Evangelical figure of his time.
• 1965: Revised edition of The Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha. Editors: May and Metzger. This edition – not just the translation – but the annotated edition – received the imprimatur from Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston.
• 1973: A major revision – (first edition of) The New Oxford Annotated Bible [editions appeared with and without Apocrypha.] Editors: May and Metzger. The contributors stayed the same as in the 1965 edition.
• 1977: The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha, Augmented Edition. Editors: May and Metzger. This version included the newly translated 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151. This version received the approval of approval of Athenagoras (Greek Orthdox Archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain, and a well-known supporter of the ecumenical movement). For many traditionalists, this was the high point of this series.
• 1991: The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Second Edition [editions appeared with and without Apocrypha.] Editors: Metzger and Roland Murphy (Duke). Roland Murphy, a Catholic priest, was well known for a variety of contributions to Biblical Studies. This edition featured a major change – it was based on the NRSV. The notes were moderately revised from the 1977 edition. A concordance was added. More controversially, the traditional two-column translation/one-column note format was abandoned for a two-column translation/two-column note format. And unfortunately, the various accents and pronunciation guides found for proper nouns in the earlier edition were abandoned, a feature that was not reappear in later editions.
• 2001: The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition [editions appeared with and without Apocrypha]. Editors: Coogan, Brettler, Newsom, Perkins. This was far beyond an ordinary revision of the Second Edition – it was a largely new rewrite. Almost every sentence was changed (except the underlying NRSV translation). A concordance was added, and the volume was larger than previous editions in every dimension. The typesetting was improved (and the format reverted to the older two-column translation/one-column note format was used). By this point, the edition was facing serious competition in the college market from the first edition of the HSB; and Oxford production team made a serious effort to fight back, and made the most easily readable version in the series to date (striking at the one of the HSB’s main weakness – its terrible physical design). Book introductions were much longer; annotations were longer (and featured more complete sentences); and far more contributors participated in the notes.
• 2007: The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Augmented Edition [so far only the edition with Apocrypha has appeared, although an edition without Apocrypha is promised.] Editors: Coogan, Brettler, Newsom, Perkins. This was a very minor update to the Third Edition; a few new black and white maps, charts and diagrams were included (put in at the end of books so the pagination remains the same), the book and section introductions had minor rewritings, and a useful glossary was added (which drew heavily on the glossary that had previously appeared in the JSB). Amusingly, the Oxford production team forgot to update the copyright page correctly (at least in the first printing.)

Review of the NOAB

• As a classroom text (here my advice is least meaningful, since a student is likely to have to choose the study Bible chosen by the class instructor)
• For self-study As a reference source.

• Best for classroom use: NOAB
• Best for self-study: NISB
• Best for reference: HSB

• Theodore Bergren (U. of Richmond): 2 Edras
• Mark Biddle (Baptist Th. Sem.): Jeremiah, Letter of Jeremiah, Baruch
• Joseph Blenkinsopp (Notre Dame): Isaiah
• M. Eugene Boring (Texas Christian U.): 1 Peter
• Sheila Briggs (USC): Galatians
• Mary Chilton Callaway (Fordham): 1 & 2 Maccabees
• David Carr (Union Th. Sem.): Genesis
• John Collins (Yale): 3 Maccabees
• Stephen Cook (Virginia Th. Sem.): Ezekiel
• Linda Day (editor, Catholic Biblical Quarterly): Judith
• F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp (Princeton): Lamentations, Song of Solomon
• Neil Elliott (adjunct faculty at United Th. Sem., Twin Cities, acquisition editor at Fortress Press): Romans
• Tamara Cohn Eskenazi (Hebrew Union Coll./Jewish Inst. Religion, Los Angeles): Ezra-Nehemiah, 1 Esdras
• Cain Hope Felder (Howard U.): James
• Obery Hendricks (New York Th. Sem.): John
• Richard Horsley (U. Mass., Boston): Mark, 1 Corinthians
• Cynthia Briggs Kittredge (Episcopal Th. Sem. Southwest): Hebrews
• Gary Knoppers (Penn. State): 1 & 2 Chronicles
• John Kselman (St. Patrick’s Sem.): Psalms, Psalm 151, Prayer of Manasseh
• Mary Joan Winn Leith (Stonehill Coll.): Ruth, Esther, Greek Esther, Jonah
• Amy-Jill Levine (Vanderbilt): Tobit, Daniel, Additions to Daniel
• Bernard Levinson (U. Minnesota): Deuteronomy
• Jennifer Maclean (Roanoke Coll.): Ephesians, Colossians
• Christopher Matthews (Weston Jesuit Sch. Th.): Acts
• Steven McKenzie (Rhodes Coll.): 1 & 2 Samuel
• Margaret Mitchell (U. Chicago): 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon
• Gregory Mobley (Andover Newton Th. Sch.): Book of the Twelve (except Jonah)
• Carolyn Osiek (Texas Christian U.): Philippians
• Andrew Overman (Macalester Coll.): Matthew
• Pheme Perkins (Boston Coll.): 1, 2, 3 John
• Iain Provan (Regent Coll.): 1 & 2 King
• Jean-Pierre Ruiz (St. John’s U.): Revelation
• Judith Sanderson (Seattle U.): Exodus
• Leong Seow (Princeton): Job, Ecclesiastes
• Abraham Smith (): 1 & 2 Thessalonians
• Marion Soards (Louisville Presbyterian Th. Sem.): Luke
• Patrick Tiller (unaffiliated): 2 Peter, Jude
• Sze-kar Wan (Andover Newton Th. Sem.): 2 Corinthians
• Harold Washington (St. Paul Sch. Th.): Proverbs, Sirach
• Walter Wilson (Emory): Wisdom of Solomon, 4 Maccabees
• David Wright (Brandeis): Leviticus, Numbers
• Lawson Younger (Trinity Int’l U.): Joshua, Judges

• Brettler: Pentateuch, Historical Books, Poetical & Wisdom Books, Canons of the Bible (w/Perkins), Hebrew Bible’s Interpretation of Itself, Jewish Interpretation in the Premodern Era
• Coogan: Textual Criticism (w/Perkins), Interpretation of the Bible: From the Nineteenth to the Mid-twentieth Centuries, Geography of the Bible, Ancient Near East
• Newsom: Prophetic Books, Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, Christian Interpretation in the Premodern Era, Contemporary Methods in Biblical Study, Persian & Hellenistic Periods
• Perkins: Gospels, Letters/Epistles, Translation of the Bible into English, New Testament Interprets the Jewish Scriptures, Roman Period

A Leftward Turn?

“This third edition of the classic New Oxford Annotated Bible represents not only a revision of a classic textbook and biblical reference work for the general reader, but nearly an entirely new book. . . . More Catholic scholars, a new group of Jewish scholars, more women, and scholars from a wider diversity of backgrounds (African-American, Latino, and Asian-American), joined the distinguished roster of contributors. The variety of interpretations, liberal and conservative, was increased. . . .

“There has been a focus in certain circles of Christian comment on these changes from traditional understanding. It is important to recognize that Oxford University Press is not aiming at influencing any current social or political trends, whether within secular society or within any church or denomination. The annotators and authors of the essays were given general instructions to guide them in writing their study materials, but except for specific indications of the length of their submissions, and the format in which they were to be submitted, they were left free to determine what they would comment on and how those comments would be shaped. The editorial board and Oxford staff reviewed every submission, and suggested numerous changes, but every revised version went back to the original author for acceptance or adjustment of the changes. No contributor was made to say anything with which he or she disagreed. It would have been impossible for one editor to impose a personal view or agenda on this process, and no editor attempted to do so. The views expressed in any of the annotations are the scholar's own, as that scholar understands the research of colleagues on the particular book of the Bible being commented on.”

• Claim: The NOAB is soft on homosexuality. I have found no passage in the notes that suggests that Bible permits homosexuality; indeed, the cited annotations make clear that homosexual behavior is unacceptable [Genesis 19:5 “disapproval of male homosexual rape is assumed here”; Romans 1:26-27 “Torah forbids a male ‘lying with a male as with a woman'"]. The comment on 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 appears to be making the same point (in a fashion appropriate for a textbook) that Rick made in this post.
• Claim: The NOAB denies Christ’s divinity. Given that belief in the divinity of Jesus is a central belief of Christianity, it would be quite surprising if this claim found support. Here, a single annotation in the book of John is quoted out of context, ignoring many other annotations which indicate that Jesus is divine in the book of John (e.g., the Introduction “It demonstrates that faith in Jesus is equivalent to faith in God . . . .”; 14:20 “their relationship with the risen Jesus will reflect the union of the Son with the Father.”
• Claim: The NOAB is soft on abortion. The claim is made that Psalms 139:13 is a prooftext for anti-abortion – I am frankly unconvinced of this reading; in any case, Jeremiah 1:5 is a much stronger notion (that God knew and selected the prophet before he was formed in the womb) and the annotation here is quite strong: “Knew, connotes a profound and intimate knowledge.”
• Claim: One NOAB editor has previously worked with member of a Christian outreach group to homosexuals. A claim is made that one of the editors worked on a project with a leader of a ministry group that reaches out to homosexuals. In an academic setting, I don’t feel it is appropriate to engage in such ad hominem attacks.
• Claim: The NOAB is infecting the Christian Mainstream. The claim is made that since the NOAB is the official text of the United Methodist Church’s Disciple Bible Study program. Of course, since this essay was published, the UMC’s publishing house, Abingdon, has produced its own study Bible, the NISB. As my quotation above showed, the NISB sometimes rather explicitly reflects a political agenda. In contrast, the NOAB is a much more neutral annotated text.

Final thoughts

Tags: study Bibles, NRSV

Tags: TNIV, NIV

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard's features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones.

Tags: Apple, Macintosh, iPhone, Windows, Vista

Tags: NLT, CEV

Tags: Bible study, Church life

Tags: TNIV

• In attempt to update the reader on other translations besides the KJV, the writer Allison Kennedy offers brief publication background on three "newer" translations: the NIV, NASB, and NKJV. Such a list would have been understandable if this article had been written in say, 1985, but there has been much significant progress made since these three translations. Of note, Kennedy doesn't even mention the 1995 update to the NASB which makes me wonder if she was using an older source for her information.
• From the article: "Joy Ahlman is a student of the Bible who takes her translations seriously. For years, the Christ Community Church member used the New International Version and the New Living Translation because both have clear language, but now she's recently switched to the New American Standard. 'I prefer to take time to study and it has cross-references and translations of different words at the bottom.'" Well, it will certainly take Joy more time to plow through the NASB than the NIV and NLT, but I'm more stunned at her reason for switching regarding "cross-references and translations of different words at the bottom." Such features are readily available in editions of the NIV and NLT, too. But such a statement demonstrates a common confusion between text and features in the minds of many Bible readers. Many times I've had to explain the difference to a church member between the text itself as the actual scripture as opposed to study notes and other features. And I've also had to explain that two editions of Bibles don't mean two different translations.
• And of course, KJV-only adherents weigh in for Kennedy's article: "'I teach and preach from the King James,' said Vann, pastor of The Rock Baptist Church in Cataula, Ga. 'The reason I do that is because newer translations leave out certain words or phrases. It's not that I'm a King-James-only guy, but it makes the people dive in deeper.' Last year, Vann led the church through a study comparing some of the translations. 'It blew their socks off,' he said of his members, many of whom weren't aware of the differences." Yeah, I bet. They're so concerned about things being taken out of their Bible, they don't realize they're buying into a textual tradition in which things have been added that the biblical writers never wrote. You'd think that there would be concern that goes both ways. A little bit of text critical knowledge would go a long way in such situations.
• Granted, this is a nitpick, but at one point Kennedy calls the New Living Translation the "New Living Bible" and says that it comes in many versions, although what she means is that it comes in many editions.
• Interestingly, in the entire article, there was no mention of the ESV or TNIV, which may say more for the awareness of these particular translations than anything about the writer of the article.

Tags: Translations

And shepherds were in the same country, waking and keeping the watches of the night on their flock. And lo, the angel of the Lord stood beside them, and the clearness of God shined about them, and they dreaded with a great dread. And the angel said to them, Nil ye dread, for lo, I preach to you a great joy that shall be to all people. For a Saviour is born today to you that is Christ the Lord in the city of David. And this is a token to you, ye shall find a young child lapped in cloths and laid in a creche. And suddenly there was made with the angel a multitude of heavenly knighthood, herying God and saying, Glory be in the highest things to God, and in earth peace to men of good will.
                    From the Gospel of Luke, chapter II

I've said before that my "Top Ten" list of Bibles is somewhat categorical in nature. One of the categories that I wanted to see represented in this series when first thinking about it was translation of a historical nature, a non-contemporary translation. I could have easily and logically picked the KJV, but it is so familiar, I doubt I could have added anything to the conversation. I came close to selecting the Geneva Bible or William Tyndale's translation, but I remembered that the era surrounding John Wycliffe had always captured my imagination.

I first discovered John Wycliffe (1320-1384) and his Lollard followers in college when I took a class devoted to Chaucer's writings. I felt immediate theological attraction to this individual often called "the morning star of the Reformation" and his conviction that all believers have a copy of the scriptures in their own native language. Later in seminary, while taking a church history class, I focused my attention on Wycliffe again as the subject of my term paper for that semester.

Then a couple of years ago, I was sitting in a seminar and I noticed one of the church history majors was reading from a very interesting Bible. Always interested in what version of the Scriptures people are reading, I looked closer to see The Wycliffe New Testament 1388 on the spine. Very much intrigued by this point, I asked him if I could look at it. He cautioned, "Yeah, but you should know that it's in Old English." Remembering my Chaucer class from years before, in which we were only allowed to read the texts in their original form in class (no modern translations or paraphrases allowed), I did my best not to sound too much like a know-it-all as I said, "Technically, that would be written in Middle-English." He looked at me with a blank stare and then said, "No, I think this is Old English." I saw him a few weeks later, and he said, "Hey, you were right--the Wycliffe Bible is written in Middle-English."

Thanks. It's probably a good thing that I didn't bring up the fact that it's very doubtful that Wycliffe had much direct influence on the translation that bears his name. Rather, most agree that the Wycliffe Bible (there were actually two different versions by that name) was produced by the Lollard community which was heavily influenced by John Wycliffe's teachings. The translation itself, while not the very first translation of the Scriptures into English, were the first product of Wycliffe's conviction that all believers, regardless of education or status had the right to access the Scriptures in their own language. The basis of the Wycliffe New Testament was the Latin Vulgate, which was ironically itself once a translation with the same goal but became a Bible for the privileged as fewer people spoke Latin.

Original copies of the Wycliffe NT were written and copied by hand. Since ownership of these texts was illegal, having a copy was a great risk. They were also very valuable, often with wheelbarrows of hay being traded for a few pages from the "pistle" of James or some other NT book. According to the introduction found in the printed copy I own, these handwritten pages of Scripture were highly treasured even long after the age of the printing press and the explosion of English translations in the sixteenth century. They only fell out of use after dramatic shifts in the English language.

The Wycliffe NT is somewhat unique because it contains the epistle to the Laodiceans, which is evidently in the Vulgate, but is no longer extant in the Greek. Although the Lollards recognized that the Catholic Church did not consider this book to be canon, they nevertheless did, assuming that it was the letter referred to in Col 4:16.

I picked up the same edition of the Wycliffe NT that the student mentioned above had. It's a very solid hand-sized hardback binding with a nice blue ribbon, published by the The British Library in association with the Tyndale Society. The pages are made from "normal" paper as opposed to Bible thin paper, and I would guess that they may be acid free. This New Testament uses a stitched binding so no doubt, it will hold together for quite a long time. If one might be prone to take notes, there are ample one inch margins interrupted only occasionally with a definition of an overly-archaic word in the text. Spelling has been modernized, and (unfortunately, in my opinion) so have many of the words. This is not really a difficult read--nothing like my Chaucer class--but it will slow down the average reader (which is often a good thing). Why some archaic words were updated and others were left alone, I have no idea. Like the original Wycliffe NT, this edition does not have verse divisions, but does contain chapter numbers.

The order of books is different from our Bibles with Acts (or "Deeds" in this version) coming after Paul's "pistles" which not only include the aforementioned letter to the Laodiceans, but also includes the letter to the Hebrews, assumed by most in the Middle Ages to have been written by Paul. For some odd reason, there's no table of contents which would have been very helpful because of the non-standard arrangement of books.

Some passages of interest:

And Jesus, seeing the people, went up into an high hill, and when He was sat, His disciples came to Him. And He opened His mouth and taught them, and said, Blessed are poor men in spirit, for the kingdom of heavens is theirs. Blessed are mild men, for they shall wield the earth. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst rightwiseness. for they shall be fulfilled. Blessed are merciful men, for they shall get mercy. Blessed are peaceable men, for they shall be called God's children. Blessed are they that suffer persecution for rightfulness, for the kingdom of heavens is theirs.
...
Ye have heard that it was said to old men, Thous shall do no lechery. But I say to you that every man that sees a woman for to covet her, has now done lechery by her in his heart. That if thy right eye sclaunder thee, pull him out and cast from thee, for it speeds to thee that one of thy members perish than that all thy body go into hell. And if thy right hand sclaunder thee, cut him away and cast from thee, for it speeds to thee that one of thy members perish than that all the body goe into hell. And it has been said, Whoever leaves his wife, give he to her a libel of forsaking. But I say to you that every man that leaves his wife, out-taken cause of fornication, makes her to do lechery. And he that weds the forsaken wife, does advowtry.
                    from the Book of Matthew, chapter V

And I comment to you Phoebe, our sister, which is in the service of the church at Cenchrea, that ye receive her in the Lord worthily to the saints, and that ye help her in whatever cause she shall need of you
....
Greet well Andronicus and Junia, my cousins and mine even prisoners, which are noble among the apostle and which were before me in Christ.
                    from the pistle of Paul to the Romans, chapter XVI


Paul, apostle, not of men nor by man, but by Jesius Christ, to the brethren that are at Laodicea, grace to you and peace, of God the Father and of the Lord Jesus Christ. I do thankings to my God by all my prayer that ye are dwelling and lasting in Him, abiding the behest in the day of doom. For neither the fain speaking of some unwise men has letted you, the which would turn you from the truth of the gospel that is preached of me. And now them that are of me to the profit of truth of the gospel, God shall make deserving and doing benignity of works and health of everlasting life. And now my bonds are open which I suffer in Christ Jesus, in which I glad and joy. And that is to me to everlasting health that this same thing be done by your prayers and ministering of the Holy Ghost, either by life, either by death. Forsooth, to me it is life to live in Christ, and to die joy. And His mercy shall do in you the same thing, that you moun have the same love and that ye are of one will. Therefore, ye well beloved brethren, hold ye and do ye in the dread of God, as ye heard [in] the presence of me, and life shall be to you without end. Soothly, it is God that works in you. And, my well beloved brethren, do ye without any withdrawing whatever things ye do. Joy ye in Christ, and eschew ye men defouled in lucre, either foul winning. Be all your askings open anents God, and be ye steadfast in the wit of Christ. And do ye those things that are holy and true, and chaste and just, and able to be loved. And keep ye in heart those things ye have heard and taken, and peace shall be to you. All holy men greet you well. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be weith your spirit, and do ye that pistle of Colossians to be read to you
                    The Pistle to Laodiceans [in its entirety]

But Saul, yet a blower of menaces and of beatings against the disciples of the Lord, came to the prince of priests and asked of him letters into Damascus, to the synagogues, that if he found any men and women of this life, he should lead them bound to Jerusalem. And when he made his journey, it befell that he came nigh to Damascus. And suddenly, a light from heaven shone about him. And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying to him Saul, Saul, what pursues thou Me? And he said, Who art Thou, Lord? And He said, I am Jesus of Nazareth whom thou pursues. It is hard to thee to kick against the prick. And he trembled and wondered, and said, Lord, what will Thou that I do? And the Lord said to him, Rise up, and enter into the city, and it shall be said to thee what it behoves thee to do.
                    from the Deeds of the Apostles, chapter IX

My little sons, I write to you these things that ye sin not. But if any man sins, we have an Advocate anents the Father, Jesus Christ, and He is the forgiveness for our sins. And not only for our sins, but also for the sins of all the world. And in this thing we wit that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He that says that he knows God and keeps not His commandments, is a liar, and truth is not in Him. But the charity of God is parfit verily in him that keeps His word. In this thing we wit that we are in Him, if we are parfit in Him. He that says that he dwells in Him, he owes for to walk as He walked.
                    from the first epistle of John, chapter II

And they had on them a king, the angel of deepness, to whom the name by Hebrew is Abaddon,, but by Greek, Apollyon. And by Latin he has the name Exterminians, that is, a destroyer. One woe is passed, and lo, yet come two woes.
                    from the Apocalypse, chapter IX