Samuel, I am interested to know what sort of hymnody is sung in your church. Do you ever sing popish hymns like "Faith of our fathers" or "There's a wideness in God's mercy" (you
did know Faber was a Roman Catholic priest, didn't you, and that "Faith of our fathers" was written as a prayer to Mary to help win England back to the Roman fold?)? Perhaps at Christmas you sing cryptocatholic songs like "O little town of Bethlehem" or Unitarian ones like "It came upon the midnight clear"? Maybe you sing closet Catholic songs like "A mighty fortress is our God", or Jewish ones like "The Lord's my Shepherd, I'll not want"? Or songs by women preachers like Fanny Crosby? (Oh, yeah, I remember, she didn't preach in church as a
woman, she preached in church as a
blind person, that's different.)
As for Bibles, more often than not I read the Esperanto "Londona Biblio" (with the Berveling deuterocanonicals, if I'm reading a recent copy). In English I read quite a variety, with the Revised English Bible probably my current favorite. The church I'm a member of has the NIV in the pews, but I'm not much of a fan of it. I prefer the NRSV or the ESV. The King James (of 1769, of course, even though it still says 1611 on the title page, so much for verbal inerrancy
) is a great one and I'm very fond of it; when I use the blueletterbible.org online version I usually opt for KJV. At that website I often access the Greek and Hebrew texts provided (which include both TR and WH versions, and the LXX) but I'll grant I don't read those languages fluently, and mostly just look at them for individual word studies. The Londona Biblio is probably most like an 1881-85 RV text with some bits of Moffatt grafted in, if you want an English analogy.
Incidentally, one of your posts (probably a cut-and-paste from some other author, but maybe it was your own assertion) said something about how easy it was to come up with first-century biblical manuscripts. Might I ask what you're talking about? As far as I know there is no first-century New Testament manuscript known to exist today, and the only known OT manuscripts from that century would be Dead-Sea-Scroll-type recent finds unrelated to the Textus Receptus line of descent, and would fall under the same general condemnation as (in your view) the Alexandrian texts do. So here's the challenge: show me one of the manuscripts you're saying are so easy to come by.
My apologies for the thread drift (though I think Fanny Crosby tied my post firmly back to the topic
) but I am indeed interested in your responses.