If you delve into the books erroneously called "Apocrypha" before long
you will notice a confusing array of differences between translations of
them. For instance, Roman Catholic bibles contain no 1 & 2 Esdras, the
King James Bible contains a shorter version of 2 Esdras than others, the
version of Ecclesiasticus in the New Revised Standard Version is longer
than that found in most other Bibles.

I have created a table to compare these and other differences in order
to track and evaluate the particulars of each Bible's "Apocrypha" in
translation. I have also developed a non-scientific scale upon which the
relative merits of each can be judged.

In the chart linked below, the various differences of the Apocrypha in
12 versions of the Bible is tracked and compared. More can be added as
they become available to me. If a version of the Bible containing these
books contains a translation based upon the "best" text we now have for
that book, they are given a score of "1", if it contains a translation
based upon an inferior text of that book they get a score of "0.5". Any
translation lacking one of these compostitions received a score of "0"
for that book.

At the bottom of the table the scores are tabulated so you can see which
bibles have the most complete and/or optimal collections of the biblical
books under consideration. Since the translators of the NRSV seem to
have gone the extra mile to acquire the best texts to translate and
since they translated more of these books than the others, the NRSV
became the benchmark for this whole exercise.

Please let me know if you have trouble viewing the table I have linked
below. Also, I would like to know if you you know of other versions of
these compostions in English.

The table as an XML spreadsheet:
http://www.summascriptura.com/files/apocrypha.xml
<http://www.summascriptura.com/files/apocrypha.xml>

As an MS Excel spreadsheet:
http://www.summascriptura.com/files/apocrypha.xls
<http://www.summascriptura.com/files/apocrypha.xls>

As an image file:
http://www.summascriptura.com/image/apocrypha.jpg
<http://www.summascriptura.com/image/apocrypha.jpg>

For the image file if viewing in Internet Explorer, in order to see more
detail > Internet Options > Advanced > Multimedia > Enable automatic
image resizing should be unchecked

Some explanatory notes:

The line items highlighted in blue represent the preferred available
text tradition for each book in the collection. For the 3 additions to
Daniel, for instance, the preferred text tradition is "Theodotion". In
this analysis, the Latin Vulgate (with the exception of 2 Esdras) is
never viewed as a preferred text tradition, because it is itself a
translation of the Greek; also it is known that Jerome, the translator
of the Vulgate, paraphrased and abridged a number of these books.

Esther poses the highest number of ways in which it has been handled by
translators. For instance, the translators of the KJV, EV and RSV did
not restore the portions from Greek Esther into the narrative sequence
of the book, so one is left with a jumble of incoherent chapters out of
their context.

Some translators DID reinsert the chapters, such as the NAB, NJB and the
NRSV-CE, but within the context of a translation of Esther from the
Hebrew.

Few translators, such as NETS and NRSV, have translated all of Greek
Esther as a unit, thus giving us a better picture of what ancient
readers of Esther in Greek would have been reading.

Three compositions, 2 Esdras, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) and Psalm 151 have
been enlarged with previously lost portions. 2 Esdras had a portion of
chapter 7 recovered from versions of that book found outside of the
Vulgate. In the case of Psalm 151, its longer original form was
recovered from the Dead Sea Scroll caves. Sirach had portions recovered
from Hebrew fragments found in the Cairo Geniza.




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