There is some (albeit disputed and indecisive) archaeological evidence David existed “as a person,” a warlord of some capacity, and no usable evidence to the contrary; I consider the matter undecidable on present evidence.

Thanks. I’ll add that to my list of things to examine.

Mulvihill on dying and rising deities v. Carrier

• Mulvihill, J. R. (2017). “The dependence between the gospels and pagan literature with regard to death and return; towards a method for evaluation”. North-West University.

3.1.3 Carrier Examined

It is clear that Carrier takes an inductive approach to expressing his contention, as is to be expected from a professional historian. One can assemble a careful syllogism based on what Carrier has here asserted:

Premise #1: Scholars without theological commitments overwhelmingly assume that the Gospels belong in the genre of mythology.

Premise #2:The adying and rising deitiesncient world abounded in examples of dying and rising deities and sacred persons.

Premise #3: The strongest example of just such a character is Zalmoxis (as represented by Herodotus).

Premise #4: Ancient people were desperate and gullible enough to sometimes come to believe in the actuality of such legendary events.

Conclusion: A salient feature of the Jesus tradition is another instantiation of these ancient socioreligious patterns/phenomena that are not to be confused with historical data.

I want to challenge both the validity of this syllogism and the truth of particular premises within it (its soundness). —(pp. 95–96)

It’s interesting, but I don’t know of any complete translation of the Bible by sufficiently qualified unbelievers. They are all by Christian dogmatists (or Jewish in some cases), although the best ones are rightly accomplished by teams, not individuals.

The closest I know is Crook’s Parallel Gospels (Crook is a fully qualified scholar, and an atheist), but it’s just the Gospels, and his translation technique is clunky (he chose to translate every word identically, ignoring context, in the hopes that we could re-interpret according to context ourselves; that’s debatable, but in any event, it looks weird, and isn’t quotable). Robert Price did something akin with The Pre-Nicene New Testament, but his translations are even more contentious and interpretive than standard translations, and thus just replace one bias for another even more distortive bias. Which is an inevitable problem no matter who does the translation.

The reason is perhaps too obvious: translating the Bible competently is such an enormous project, it would require millions of dollars in funding to cover the hours of work required (and writing a critical commentary verse-by-verse is no easier; it takes the same amount of time, or even more). And no one but believers are willing to front that kind of cash. There also would be insufficient money in selling the result to pay even a fraction of the cost, so that can’t motivate or fund it either.

Such a project would be especially difficult because any translator will of course introduce their own bias into the translation, and the effort to control for that or make it transparent is even more expensive in time (hence Crook’s strategy of not even interpreting the text at all; and he could only complete four books out of the sixty or so that comprise the whole Bible; and the result is of mixed utility).

Note that that may be the case for this verse, but it may be a different translation that’s closer to the text in another verse, and so on. So you can’t find “one” translation to count on. They all suck. They just suck in different places. And there’s no way to tell but to check in every case.

“Nevertheless, Biblehub can generate such a comparison on any single verse for you (example).”
Gal 1.19.

The only translation that seems currect out’v that weltr is the “God’s Wurd” wun.

But I only no that owing tu ur effurts. The communtries ar’v littl help and misleding if recugnising the wurding.

Response: I can certainly understand and appreciate that. I was hoping that maybe just maybe someone with the qualifications (and without theological bias) might’ve already taken on such an endeavor and produced such a product already.

Pragmatically speaking that probably makes more sense than individual amateurs taking a stab at it.

Or at the very least just produce an exception list of all of the versus that are improperly translated that one could use in conjunction with one of the existing standard translations.

I still don’t understand what your question is.

If you are asking about studies regarding the correlation of crime rates and religiosity and life satisfaction and religiosity, there are indeed several, published by Phil Zuckerman, Gregory Paul, and others (e.g. for one of the latest summary of studies, see the book Sacred and Secular).

As to the Bible, not really. All translations distort. I will often use the NIV or NAS as among the “cleaner” texts, but even they cannot be uniformly trusted. And there are no annotated translations that do what you want. The best you can do is, when a reading is important, compare numerous translations to see if you can detect ideological “fudging” in some of them. But even that is not foolproof, as there are still places where all translations disguise the real meaning by making the same assumptions about what they think the text is “supposed” to say or by all mistakenly attributing a modern rather than and ancient context for understanding the words in the text. You also might not know which variations are the “fudging” and which more honest to the text or context. There simply is no substitute for being able to look at the underlying language and knowing the actual context of that language’s use.

Nevertheless, Biblehub can generate such a comparison on any single verse for you (example).

I also teach some skills in using resources even for laypeople to get at the underlying language, not as well as an expert can but better than you could without that training. I will be offering my Introduction to New Testament Studies course again sometime this year.

My apologies it wasn’t specifically related to the topic at hand. I just seem to recall you saying something to the effect that most predominantly religious countries have higher crime rates, etc, This article/study seems to confirm that those countries are also not top of the list when it comes to happiness (well being).

Probably not a surprise to you. Just curious if you had seen this report before.

Now on a another completely separate note I was wondering if there is a specific version of the Bible (Old and New Testament) that you would recommend.

I recall you saying something to the effect that English versions of the Bible weren’t translated well (into English). Realistically speaking I’m not going to learn Greek or Hebrew. So is there a specific version of the Bible that you would recommend? Or at least one that is less bad than all of the rest? If no such thing exists have you considered writing your own version with a “proper” translation. Or at least ab annotated version if the Bible that points out all of the bad translations?