5 ms·

Is it not significant because of the content (ie very similar to other texts), or because theology has such inertia that it couldn't be changed? Suppose it def

Is it not significant because of the content (ie very similar to other texts), or because theology has such inertia that it couldn't be changed? Suppose it definitely was the first KJB, and said something that strongly contradicted modern theology. Wouldn't modern theocrats just ignore or discredit it? [possibly worth noting I am as cynical about politics. Suppose Americans found a "true" first version of the Constitution that clearly outlawed private citizens gun ownership* (versus miiltia). Wouldn't most gun advocates simply ignore / explain away that text? Thought experiment also requires the pretense that the differences were due to transcription changes, not actual belief changes] * instead of "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed," imagine it read, "Private citizens may own firearms if and only if, and while registered and paid entirely by a state-run militia, may access guns, but cannot use them except in their active attempts to overthrow a tyrannical government."

jonah 11y ago
Is it any more or less than other things we discuss here? Meh. It is of historical interest though. (And in the grand scheme of things, this story isn't that popular, plus Sunday is a slow news day.)
- saryant 11y ago
  I like Sundays on Hacker News. A lot of interesting but non-tech posts that would otherwise get buried manage to make it to the front page.
gdwatson 11y ago
"Suppose it definitely was the first KJB, and said something that strongly contradicted modern theology. Wouldn't modern theocrats just ignore or discredit it?" Only a minority of a minority of English-speaking Christians regard the KJV as having any particular authority. For most of us it's a historical translation that is culturally, and sometimes sentimentally, important. But I doubt even KJV-inerrantists would regard a draft as authoritative. And that's what makes this document interesting -- it's a draft; we have early editions of the KJV, but surprisingly few of the translators' notes.
timv 11y ago
Firstly, this notebook contains the translation for 1 book, and the partial translation of another, neither of which are considered "scripture" by most protestant Christians. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches have never had any particular connection to the King James bible, so there are very few churches that use (or previously used) these particular books from the King James version. Hence, it is hard to imagine that anything that would found in this notebook would be of particular theological relevance to almost anyone. That said, if someone were to find a similar notebook for a "mainstream" book, it would still be of only minor consequence. Even within strongly evangelical protestant churches, there is not a lot of specific theological reverence for the King James Bible. It was a remarkable achievement and did a lot to aid in the accessibility and spread of the bible in Western Europe and the colonies, but it is - in most churches - viewed as simply another translation. It was done by good people with the best of intentions, using the best manuscripts and technique available to them at the time, but that does not make it perfect, nor does it make it "scripture" in a way that another translation isn't. We know what source material they used, and we know what they produced as output. These notebooks help understand the process by which they did that, but that's more of historical interest than anything else. Plenty of people have undertaken the process of comparing the source material with the KJV output, so that the christian church is well aware of the relative strengths and weaknesses of that translation. It is discovery of early source material that has the potential to cause ripples in modern christian theology - the discovery of the dead sea scrolls had a far bigger impact on modern bible translations than any KJV notebooks ever could. There are a small number of Christian churches who believe that the KJV is "the true bible". If we found that the draft versions of the bible were greatly different than the final version, that might cause some angst for them, but generally their views are based on a form of the idea that "God protected his church by providing this bible translation" so they would simply accept that God was at working directing the translators to reject the draft version and accept the final version.
esaym 11y ago
It is not "significant" because the KJV text has not changed (other than grammar or spelling) in 400 years. The KJV was translated from known sources. The only clues to be found in old KJV stuff would be how the overall translation process was laid out (which is what the article talks about)
olavk 11y ago
The KJB is a (famous) English translation of the Bible, it is not some kind of original scripture or source document. So if an alternative draft was found which differed theologically it would and should have exactly zero theological implication. But it would of course be quite interesting for historical reasons.
hugh4 11y ago
You do realise that the King James Bible is just a fairly recent translation of a bunch of much older stuff and that we have much older Bibles written in various languages, right? Now, a first draft of the Koran, that would put the cat among the pigeons...
- DanBC 11y ago
  We've got pretty close. There's a document created within 20 years of the prophet's death: http://irfi.org/articles/articles_401_450/oldest_quran_in_the_world.htm http://irfi.org/articles/articles_401_450/oldest_quran_in_th... And there's this one too: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33436021 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33436021 > These tests provide a range of dates, showing that, with a probability of more than 95%, the parchment was from between 568 and 645. > "They could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam," said David Thomas, the university's professor of Christianity and Islam. > "According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received the revelations that form the Koran, the scripture of Islam, between the years 610 and 632, the year of his death."
cbd1984 11y ago
> Wouldn't modern theocrats just ignore or discredit it? If they did, so what? It isn't like they could suppress it. > Suppose Americans found a "true" first version of the Constitution that clearly outlawed private citizens gun ownership* (versus miiltia). Interesting hypothetical; utterly and fantastically unlikely, to the point of requiring something like time travel to achieve, but interesting nonetheless. My answer is that it should be ignored, not because I'm a huge gun fan (I'm somewhat indifferent to them myself) but because a system of laws requires a system of stable laws subject to revision through normal legal processes, not laws subject to sudden and discontinuous revision through a process of digging up new documents. Law is many things. One of the things it is is predictability: People are presumed to know the law, so the law is presumed to be relatively stable over time. Changes are announced, go through a process, and are then enacted. They aren't sprung on people willy-nilly because someone looked behind the right filing cabinet.
hga 11y ago
[possibly worth noting I am as cynical about politics. Suppose Americans found a "true" first version of the Constitution that clearly outlawed private citizens gun ownership * (versus miiltia). Wouldn't most gun advocates simply ignore / explain away that text? Thought experiment also requires the pretense that the differences were due to transcription changes, not actual belief changes] * instead of "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed," imagine it read, "Private citizens may own firearms if and only if, and while registered and paid entirely by a state-run militia, may access guns, but cannot use them except in their active attempts to overthrow a tyrannical government." This would be pretty hard to arrange, seeing as: We have the original source texts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, see http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_downloads.html http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_downloads... Compare to the New Testament, which per my limited study wasn't immediately committed to writing, and several centuries later the Church had to decide which books and which versions were canonical. Then there's the translation problem, the original is in the common dialect of Greek from 300BC to 300AD per Wikipedia. You can read the above copy of the Bill of Rights (in person if you make the trip to D.C.) and the only issue is how the definition of words have changed (militia) or have had additional connotations added (regulated). We also have original source texts explaining the context and details that went into drafts and then final versions, e.g. the initial justification clause, common in state constitutions of the time, was a sop thrown to the subset of the founders who were justifiably suspicious of centralized and especially standing armies, but were overruled by military leaders like George Washington, who, of course, won the Revolutionary War with the latter sort of army and wasn't at all fond of the militia system for those sorts of extremes. Then there's all the contemporary records that make it clear that to our Founders the right to self-defense was a natural and unalienable right; compare the language of the 2nd to the language of the 1st, which was much more limited. Getting back to religion, it starts: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.... Only the Federal government is constrained (prior to the 14th Amendment), it certainly wouldn't have been accepted by states like Massachusetts which had an official state (established) religion at the time. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion#Former_state_churches_in_British_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion#Former_state_ch... - The colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, New Haven, and New Hampshire were founded by Puritan Calvinist Protestants. - The colonies of New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were officially established under the auspices of the Church of England. - The Colony of Maryland was founded by a charter granted in 1632 to George Calvert, secretary of state to Charles I, and his son Cecil, both recent converts to Roman Catholicism. Under their leadership many English Catholic gentry families settled in Maryland. However, the colonial government was officially neutral in religious affairs, granting toleration to all Christian groups and enjoining them to avoid actions which antagonized the others. On several occasions, low-church dissenters led insurrections which temporarily overthrew the Calvert rule. In 1689, when William and Mary came to the English throne, they acceded to demands to revoke the original royal charter. In 1701, the Church of England was proclaimed, and in the course of the 18th century Maryland Catholics were first barred from public office, then disenfranchised, although not all of the laws passed against them (notably laws restricting property rights and imposing penalties for sending children to be educated in foreign Catholic institutions) were enforced, and some Catholics even continued to hold public office. - The Province of Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers, but the colony never had an established church. - The Province of New Jersey, without official religion, had a significant Quaker lobby, but Calvinists of all types also had a presence. - Delaware Colony had no established church, but was contested between Catholics and Quakers. - The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, founded by religious dissenters forced to flee the Massachusetts Bay colony, is widely regarded as the first polity to grant religious freedom to all its citizens, although Catholics were barred intermittently. Baptists, Seekers/Quakers and Jews made this colony their home. The King Charles Charter of 1663 guaranteed "full liberty in religious concernments" Per a following table, Connecticut and Massachusetts retained their established religions for 2-3.5 decades, and New Hampshire and South Carolina for a couple of years after the Constitution was ratified. Moving to interpretation, if you believe self-defense et. al. are natural, unalienable rights, the 2nd Amendment merely acknowledges that, and its current near total abridgment is meaningless outside of what various governments believe they can, and indeed do. By that, I mean that while Heller and McDonald say we have a right to keep a gun available for self-defense in the home, D.C. and NYC can and do effectively forbid this, and there's no prospect that'll change for NYC, while the court cases in D.C. look to drag on for many more years (Chicago's ban got zapped by McDonald). But then there's that pesky "and bear arms" bit, not covered by the Supremes except in the context of your home (yep, D.C. forbid that), and not recognized outside of the 7th United States courts of appeals (i.e. Illinois) or by the Supremes, and being litigated in the 9th, where it will probably lose, and D.C. where it's dragging on like mere ownership. Anyway, the point of the above three paragraphs of details going into the weeds for most people is that even based on a much more solid textual and contextual foundation, the simple English words of the 2nd Amendment in practice allow for about as much interpretation as we see in practice happening with the Bible. Except, of course, the state has bowed out of the game pretty much everywhere in formerly Christian world.

jonah 11y ago

Is it any more or less than other things we discuss here? Meh. It is of historical interest though. (And in the grand scheme of things, this story isn't that popular, plus Sunday is a slow news day.)

saryant 11y ago
I like Sundays on Hacker News. A lot of interesting but non-tech posts that would otherwise get buried manage to make it to the front page.

gdwatson 11y ago

"Suppose it definitely was the first KJB, and said something that strongly contradicted modern theology. Wouldn't modern theocrats just ignore or discredit it?" Only a minority of a minority of English-speaking Christians regard the KJV as having any particular authority. For most of us it's a historical translation that is culturally, and sometimes sentimentally, important. But I doubt even KJV-inerrantists would regard a draft as authoritative. And that's what makes this document interesting -- it's a draft; we have early editions of the KJV, but surprisingly few of the translators' notes.

timv 11y ago

Firstly, this notebook contains the translation for 1 book, and the partial translation of another, neither of which are considered "scripture" by most protestant Christians. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches have never had any particular connection to the King James bible, so there are very few churches that use (or previously used) these particular books from the King James version. Hence, it is hard to imagine that anything that would found in this notebook would be of particular theological relevance to almost anyone. That said, if someone were to find a similar notebook for a "mainstream" book, it would still be of only minor consequence. Even within strongly evangelical protestant churches, there is not a lot of specific theological reverence for the King James Bible. It was a remarkable achievement and did a lot to aid in the accessibility and spread of the bible in Western Europe and the colonies, but it is - in most churches - viewed as simply another translation. It was done by good people with the best of intentions, using the best manuscripts and technique available to them at the time, but that does not make it perfect, nor does it make it "scripture" in a way that another translation isn't. We know what source material they used, and we know what they produced as output. These notebooks help understand the process by which they did that, but that's more of historical interest than anything else. Plenty of people have undertaken the process of comparing the source material with the KJV output, so that the christian church is well aware of the relative strengths and weaknesses of that translation. It is discovery of early source material that has the potential to cause ripples in modern christian theology - the discovery of the dead sea scrolls had a far bigger impact on modern bible translations than any KJV notebooks ever could. There are a small number of Christian churches who believe that the KJV is "the true bible". If we found that the draft versions of the bible were greatly different than the final version, that might cause some angst for them, but generally their views are based on a form of the idea that "God protected his church by providing this bible translation" so they would simply accept that God was at working directing the translators to reject the draft version and accept the final version.

esaym 11y ago

It is not "significant" because the KJV text has not changed (other than grammar or spelling) in 400 years. The KJV was translated from known sources. The only clues to be found in old KJV stuff would be how the overall translation process was laid out (which is what the article talks about)

olavk 11y ago

The KJB is a (famous) English translation of the Bible, it is not some kind of original scripture or source document. So if an alternative draft was found which differed theologically it would and should have exactly zero theological implication. But it would of course be quite interesting for historical reasons.

hugh4 11y ago

You do realise that the King James Bible is just a fairly recent translation of a bunch of much older stuff and that we have much older Bibles written in various languages, right? Now, a first draft of the Koran, that would put the cat among the pigeons...

DanBC 11y ago
We've got pretty close. There's a document created within 20 years of the prophet's death: http://irfi.org/articles/articles_401_450/oldest_quran_in_the_world.htm http://irfi.org/articles/articles_401_450/oldest_quran_in_th... And there's this one too: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33436021 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33436021 > These tests provide a range of dates, showing that, with a probability of more than 95%, the parchment was from between 568 and 645. > "They could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam," said David Thomas, the university's professor of Christianity and Islam. > "According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received the revelations that form the Koran, the scripture of Islam, between the years 610 and 632, the year of his death."

cbd1984 11y ago

> Wouldn't modern theocrats just ignore or discredit it? If they did, so what? It isn't like they could suppress it. > Suppose Americans found a "true" first version of the Constitution that clearly outlawed private citizens gun ownership* (versus miiltia). Interesting hypothetical; utterly and fantastically unlikely, to the point of requiring something like time travel to achieve, but interesting nonetheless. My answer is that it should be ignored, not because I'm a huge gun fan (I'm somewhat indifferent to them myself) but because a system of laws requires a system of stable laws subject to revision through normal legal processes, not laws subject to sudden and discontinuous revision through a process of digging up new documents. Law is many things. One of the things it is is predictability: People are presumed to know the law, so the law is presumed to be relatively stable over time. Changes are announced, go through a process, and are then enacted. They aren't sprung on people willy-nilly because someone looked behind the right filing cabinet.

hga 11y ago

[possibly worth noting I am as cynical about politics. Suppose Americans found a "true" first version of the Constitution that clearly outlawed private citizens gun ownership * (versus miiltia). Wouldn't most gun advocates simply ignore / explain away that text? Thought experiment also requires the pretense that the differences were due to transcription changes, not actual belief changes] * instead of "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed," imagine it read, "Private citizens may own firearms if and only if, and while registered and paid entirely by a state-run militia, may access guns, but cannot use them except in their active attempts to overthrow a tyrannical government." This would be pretty hard to arrange, seeing as: We have the original source texts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, see http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_downloads.html http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_downloads... Compare to the New Testament, which per my limited study wasn't immediately committed to writing, and several centuries later the Church had to decide which books and which versions were canonical. Then there's the translation problem, the original is in the common dialect of Greek from 300BC to 300AD per Wikipedia. You can read the above copy of the Bill of Rights (in person if you make the trip to D.C.) and the only issue is how the definition of words have changed (militia) or have had additional connotations added (regulated). We also have original source texts explaining the context and details that went into drafts and then final versions, e.g. the initial justification clause, common in state constitutions of the time, was a sop thrown to the subset of the founders who were justifiably suspicious of centralized and especially standing armies, but were overruled by military leaders like George Washington, who, of course, won the Revolutionary War with the latter sort of army and wasn't at all fond of the militia system for those sorts of extremes. Then there's all the contemporary records that make it clear that to our Founders the right to self-defense was a natural and unalienable right; compare the language of the 2nd to the language of the 1st, which was much more limited. Getting back to religion, it starts: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.... Only the Federal government is constrained (prior to the 14th Amendment), it certainly wouldn't have been accepted by states like Massachusetts which had an official state (established) religion at the time. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion#Former_state_churches_in_British_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion#Former_state_ch... - The colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, New Haven, and New Hampshire were founded by Puritan Calvinist Protestants. - The colonies of New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were officially established under the auspices of the Church of England. - The Colony of Maryland was founded by a charter granted in 1632 to George Calvert, secretary of state to Charles I, and his son Cecil, both recent converts to Roman Catholicism. Under their leadership many English Catholic gentry families settled in Maryland. However, the colonial government was officially neutral in religious affairs, granting toleration to all Christian groups and enjoining them to avoid actions which antagonized the others. On several occasions, low-church dissenters led insurrections which temporarily overthrew the Calvert rule. In 1689, when William and Mary came to the English throne, they acceded to demands to revoke the original royal charter. In 1701, the Church of England was proclaimed, and in the course of the 18th century Maryland Catholics were first barred from public office, then disenfranchised, although not all of the laws passed against them (notably laws restricting property rights and imposing penalties for sending children to be educated in foreign Catholic institutions) were enforced, and some Catholics even continued to hold public office. - The Province of Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers, but the colony never had an established church. - The Province of New Jersey, without official religion, had a significant Quaker lobby, but Calvinists of all types also had a presence. - Delaware Colony had no established church, but was contested between Catholics and Quakers. - The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, founded by religious dissenters forced to flee the Massachusetts Bay colony, is widely regarded as the first polity to grant religious freedom to all its citizens, although Catholics were barred intermittently. Baptists, Seekers/Quakers and Jews made this colony their home. The King Charles Charter of 1663 guaranteed "full liberty in religious concernments" Per a following table, Connecticut and Massachusetts retained their established religions for 2-3.5 decades, and New Hampshire and South Carolina for a couple of years after the Constitution was ratified. Moving to interpretation, if you believe self-defense et. al. are natural, unalienable rights, the 2nd Amendment merely acknowledges that, and its current near total abridgment is meaningless outside of what various governments believe they can, and indeed do. By that, I mean that while Heller and McDonald say we have a right to keep a gun available for self-defense in the home, D.C. and NYC can and do effectively forbid this, and there's no prospect that'll change for NYC, while the court cases in D.C. look to drag on for many more years (Chicago's ban got zapped by McDonald). But then there's that pesky "and bear arms" bit, not covered by the Supremes except in the context of your home (yep, D.C. forbid that), and not recognized outside of the 7th United States courts of appeals (i.e. Illinois) or by the Supremes, and being litigated in the 9th, where it will probably lose, and D.C. where it's dragging on like mere ownership. Anyway, the point of the above three paragraphs of details going into the weeds for most people is that even based on a much more solid textual and contextual foundation, the simple English words of the 2nd Amendment in practice allow for about as much interpretation as we see in practice happening with the Bible. Except, of course, the state has bowed out of the game pretty much everywhere in formerly Christian world.