Bibles: Too Many Translations?

Yes, there are many translations. Yes, this can cause confusion. But what do you think, do we have too many? What is the alternative?

From RNS, at HuffPo:

“Bibles are in many ways a cash cow,” said Phyllis Tickle, a former longtime religion editor at Publishers Weekly. “The Bible is the mainstay of many a publishing program.”

However, some Christian scholars wonder whether too much Good News can sometimes be a bad thing, as a major new translation and waves of books marking the 400th anniversary of the venerable King James Bible inundate the market this fall.

The assortment of translations and “niche Bibles” (think, “The Holy Bible: Stock Car Racing Edition”) sow confusion and division among Christians, invite ridicule from relativists, and risk reducing God’s word into just another personal-shopping preference, the scholars say.

“I think we are drifting more and more to a diverse Babel of translations,” said David Lyle Jeffrey, former provost of Baylor University and an expert on biblical translations. Jeffrey believes Americans need a “common Bible” — a role the King James Version played
for centuries — to communicate the grandeur of Scripture without reducing it to “shopping-center-level” discourse.

“When we have so much diversity we lose our common voice,” he said. “It is in effect moving away from a common membership in the body of Christ into disparate, confusing misrepresentations of the rich wisdom of Scripture, which ought to unify us.”