Blatantly Biased Bibles? (Review of Popular Study Bible Editions)

you know when we finished reading Harry Potter to the kids as bedtime stories they were sad to see it go but they were excited for the next thing I was like well what do you guys want to do next you want to do another fantasy adventure magic kind of thing and they're like no dad we just did that we want something that's more about economics and the tension between individualism and the individuals larger role in the collective and I was like yes absolutely but we should do wealth of nations by Adam Smith and its companion volume the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and they loved it if you know anything about political philosophy even a little bit you know that those two books by Smith and by Marx really are tackling the same subject matter but they also are obviously coming from very very different perspectives and you just take that into account when you read a book like that or when you talk with someone about a book like that it would be easy when we talk about the Bible and in particular Bibles with resources or study Bibles as we call them to imagine that all of these things are created equal and that they're trying to accomplish the same thing well they are all tackling the same subject matter but some of them are doing so from a very different angle than others and taking that into account and understanding what a Study Bible is going for and why it exists is hugely important in using it in a way that's actually useful and in picking out which one you might want to drop a ridiculous amount of money to buy so in this video I'm going to talk about a bunch of different brands of study Bibles what's behind them what the thinking is and then you can figure out for yourself if any of these make sense or if you might like to use your money on something else and that there's a Tim in the Bible our here we go [Music] the earliest ever study Bible if you will was the Geneva Bible and is in English or translated into English it had the chapters and verses but it dates all the way to 1560 so this would have been Shakespeare's Bible Cromwell's Bible this would have been the Bible that a lot of those people who are on the outside looking in in terms of where church was going in the 1500s and 1600s people who came across the ocean to what we now call the u.s. to start over and do a different version of Christianity this was their Bible and it's a Bible that was full of notes it actually looks a lot like what modern study Bibles look like obviously it would have been very reformed in its theology because Geneva was maybe the headquarters of the Reformation after the era of Luther and if you still want that Bible you can still get the 1560 edition with the notes I assume it's been updated in some ways but I don't know I've never had one what I know is a lot of people respect it and it's the first and then after that well there really wasn't anything for quite a while that fit the bill of study Bible in the early part of the 20th century a guy named Frank Charles Thompson put together a very unique Bible called the Thompson chain reference Bible this is not a Study Bible in the way we typically think of it it's not full of notes and stuff like that generally is printed with pretty big margins and extensive cross-referencing to help someone who wants to do their own study to buzz around the Bible and find all the patterns and connections for themselves this Bible was very popular when it first came out and continues to be pretty popular today although it's not as needed today because almost every Bible has a pretty useful functional cross-reference or chain reference section there in the margins [Music] it wasn't until the turn of the last century 1900 ish I don't know exactly when that a guy named Cyrus Ingerson Scofield put together the Study Bible that would bring study Bibles back into vogue and maybe it brought study Bibles back into vogue because people felt like they needed to make study Bibles in order to disagree with the theology of his Study Bible I'm not saying this guy was right or wrong enough any time to get into it meaningfully but he held certain views about God's working with the world and the church and people through time and especially held certain views regarding how that would unfold at the end of time that not everybody agrees with to this day one word you'll hear to describe it is dispensationalism the themes and theological underpinnings of dispensationalism catch on and as a result people really latch onto Scofield Study Bible is pretty much standard issue in terms of structure and form it doesn't have all the fancy it maps and colored in stuff that the the new modern Bibles have but it certainly had his theological persuasion on the same page as the text in my opinion this opened a bit of a Pandora's box into having theological persuasion Bibles floating around out there for better for worse [Music] the NIV is the best-selling modern translation or has been for a really long time they have a Study Bible that is simply called the NIV Study Bible New International Version I like this translation I'm gonna be honest I'm pretty lukewarm on the Study Bible edition I just think it's too safe it's beautiful as I've mentioned once or twice or every video it smells great I'm getting nose marks on this because it smells so great this is actually kind of a plea for help I think I might be addicted to the leather smell of this Bible but inside this yeah you got color on every page and cool maps and charts but the notes are so safe they're just milk-toast it's like the way john madden used to call NFL games or he'd be like well if you don't score parts you can't weight a football oh my god yep thanks we're just filling time now I feel like some of the notes in here insightful but a lot of them are like in this passage Jesus is saying that love is very important yep that's definitely what it's saying thank you well no one's going to be mad at you at least so if you want something safe and middle-of-the-road I think the NIV is fine and it really does get out of the way and let you do the work but they just said might be the point [Music] so in addition to the NIV Study Bible a lot of other translations seem to be coming out with their own study Bibles associated with them like the English standard version Study Bible which we've looked at a little bit in a previous video I really like it I think it has great notes and it's useful it's just so dang big there's a I don't have it here there's a New King James Study Bible that has been floating around here that I've looked at a little bit it looks a lot like this but maybe catered toward a 1% more conservative crowd maybe I'm not an expert on this the new American Standard Bible has its inductive study methods Study Bible now it's hard it's meant to be hard they know their audience the new American Standard Bible you'll remember is the most literal word-for-word style translation so it's not poetry I mean it's pretty clunky to read because languages don't translate smoothly that way but the people who would choose to use that kind of a Bible or picking it because they want to try to get deep into the language well smart people over at the NSB place figured out NASB place rather figured out well we need to cater to that audience and we need to make our Study Bible scholarly and a bit more difficult and challenging what you're gonna find is with all of these translation based study Bibles you're gonna have varying degrees of difficulty usually associated with how hard or easy that translation is to read for a normal person [Music] okay now I want to talk about modern study Bibles that have a little bit of a theological angle to them actually know some of these actually have a pretty significant theological angle to them but I'll try to be charitable and explain it as best I can the Bible that sits on my desk is the Ryrie Study Bible it's produced by Moody press Charles Ryrie is the guy behind this he's pretty much center-cut evangelical in his theology if you don't know what that means that's fine Google of Oller we'll talk about it in a future video he's out of some of the same school as that Scofield guy who I referenced earlier though I would say that part of the appeal of this Study Bible is that those theological preferences don't come through as thickly in the notes it's not at the center assertion of this Study Bible and I've got a lot of use out of it and I've beat this thing to garbage so I've appreciated it and additionally this one was really popular about 20 years ago you'd see a ton of people dragging this around not quite as popular now I say anecdotally additionally there is a reformed Study Bible or Reformation Study Bible that's floating around now very popular in the English standard version and let me tell you if you want to look cool get one of those I mean the Reformation and just had its 500th birthday and and especially amongst people who like the teachings of John Calvin who is a really important figure in the middle of the 16th century and the Protestant Reformation they are gonna love that Bible and they should it's a really good Bible but if you pick it up you have to understand that you are you're holding a Bible that is entirely through the lenses of Reformed thought which overwhelmingly could be defined as just Christian thought biblical thought but not all Christians exactly agree on this and you should know what you're picking up when you do additionally the the Catholics they've got they've got a Study Bible and is it just called a Catholic Study Bible I should look this up I should know this I think it is just called the Catholic Study Bible I've had a chance to flip through it before and I remember feeling like this is good scholarship this is quality stuff because after all I'm the arbiter of what is good scholarship in my stupid humble opinion it seemed like good scholarship and of course as I went through it I was like this is good scholarship if you're a Catholic and you are interpreting the Bible through the lenses of the teachings of the Catholic Church which you might be into and you might not of course that Catholic Bible is going to have the deuterocanonical books or what Protestants call the Apocrypha those extra books that are part of the Old Testament of course there'll be commentary on that and some of those things might factor into some of the notes in other parts of the Bible obviously it's coming from an angle and you're smart you can take that into account whether you're a Catholic or otherwise additionally if you fall toward the end of the spectrum associated with Pentecostalism that is kind of the the mystical miraculous wing of Christianity I've been pretty upfront about it on this channel that is not my style I don't hold in the ill-will towards someone who maybe does prefer that I'm skeptical of some of their assertions but and they would not enjoy the kind of study Bibles I enjoy because the kind of study Bibles that make sense to me well would have notes that would be frankly really condemning of some of those practices so there is such a thing as I think it's called the Apostolic Study Bible that leans really heavily toward Pentecostal charismatic theology and again you don't have to be into that to get along with me but if you are into that you should know what you're picking up if you pick that up and if it's what you're into it's gonna be great and if it's not it's gonna be confusing and frustrating finally there is a Study Bible called the life application Study Bible that is very popular I mean it was wildly popular a few years back but I've always kind of had a hesitation with calling that a Study Bible because it really is more of a where do you fit into this passage what does the Bible mean to you right now today approach to reading the Bible as opposed to a more typical approach of these study Bibles would be where does God factor into this story they're more theologically centered instead of person centered so the life application Bible is gonna be one that's very readable for somebody who's kind of on the front end of faith and in this trying to figure out where they fit what do I do what is what does this mean in terms of my life and where I'm going from here and if you pick it up with that understanding I think it is wildly helpful if it's the Bible you're going with for your entire Christian experience I think eventually you're gonna outgrow it and you're gonna want something that'll get you a little too into a little deeper water I left out a ton of stuff and there's some of you are like wow my Study Bible and your gripe is completely legitimate I'm sorry I didn't get to them all bottom line these things are a wonderful tool I they are they're a full toolkit of Bible Resources on the go when you need them and they also have given some people over the years a chance to flex their muscles and put their words right alongside the words of the Bible to smoking-gun prove that what they think about stuff is the right way to think about it and ultimately it is up to the reader to figure out what to do with those things and how to distill this down to something that that makes sense to you so it can be what it needs to be in order to make sense in your brain I feel like I just said that about four times in four different ways that means it's time to be done I'm at is the 10 minute Bible hour I really appreciate you [Music] you

Channel: The Ten Minute Bible Hour

Views: 290,117

Rating: 4.727807 out of 5

Keywords: Study Bibles, What Bible Should I Buy?, Bible Buying guide, Bible reviews, reference bibles, life application bible, niv study bible, esv study bible, kjv study bible, scofield bible, thompson chain reference, nasb, nlt, new living translation, matt whitman, no dumb questions, 10 minute bible hour, christian humor

Id: 49LK1bFkJyE

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 08 2018