I have been using Craig S. Keener's "The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament" along with my Bible reading. He makes an interesting point regarding translation: the content of the source documents must make sense according to the culture that we live in. One example he uses is the idea of sheep/lambs. There are cultures that don't have these animals, but have pigs, so translating the word "sheep" is meaningless to them. Expanding on this idea, he says that since we don't live in the Greek/Hebrew culture of thousands of years ago, the concepts expressed in the source documents must be translated so that the meanings are clear to our modern minds.
One of the things that immediately came to mind was that, not only don't we live in that Greek/Hebrew culture, we also don't live in the early 17th Century culture of England. That is why I don't like the King James translation. None of us truly understand what living in that culture was like, so the concepts put forth are alien to us. Perhaps not as much so as the Biblical culture, but none of us are feudal peasants living a subsistence culture under feudal lords and a monarchy. We live a modern lifestyle in a technological culture, governed (for the most part) by representative democracies (or similar systems). There was, for example, no electricity, no modern mass transit, no electronic communication, no industrial manufacturing, etc.
In my opinion, this unfortunately leads to people misunderstanding what the King James translation actually means. They re-translate the KJV Bible into their modern minds, thinking that what it says according to their 21st Century minds is what it actually meant (not forgetting, of course, that the 17th Century translators had to interpret what the Biblical authors mean in the cultures they lived in!)
My advice to anyone is to use a translation that transmits what the Biblical authors truly meant into our 21st Century understanding. If I had to choose one that best fits this model I (like many, many others) would choose the NIV. However, my favorite is the NET. Not only does it fit the above criteria, but the 60,000+ translator notes carefully explain the meanings and doctrine of the earliest and best source texts.
