It all started around seventeen years ago. After some time away from church, I began attending again. I hadn’t really looked at a Bible in several years; I had a King James Bible my father had given me when I was a kid, and a Living Bible that my grandma had given me a year or so before that. I went to Border’s bookstore in Chicago, looking for a Bible that I could use at the Bible study at St. James Episcopal Cathedral. I think I browsed through a couple, and settled on an NRSV Bible. It probably read a lot like the RSV we had used in confirmation class in the Lutheran church in which I had grown up. A little while later, I seem to recall, I acquired a New American Bible, probably because it had the Apocrypha in it.

Those first couple years of collecting Bibles, I think I was only vaguely aware how many translations were available, but I soon discovered that there were an awful lot of translations to choose from. I added a New Living Translation to my collection, and Eugene Peterson’s The Message, I think. Somewhere along the line I found a New English Bible, a Revised English Bible, and a few others. I seem to remember the real Bible collecting started in earnest seven or eight years ago. That’s when my collection grew from a couple dozen or so Bibles into what it is now: 233 volumes at last count.

Just for fun, off the top of my head, here are some of the different translations I have in my collection:

KJV, RSV, NRSV, ESV, HCSB, NLT, NEB, REB, NET, NIV, TNIV, NIV2011, TEV, NAB, NASB, NASBu, NIrV, NCV, LB, Message, Moffatt, CEV, CEB, JB, NJB, DRB, and more…

The thing is, I find the different translations endlessly fascinating: the nuances that each translator or committee finds in the text, the different readings of the text in the original languages and how they impact the translation, and of course, all the myriad ways in which something from an ancient language can be expressed in English (and other languages). Sometimes the number of different translations seems like it’s getting kind of ridiculous. Why do we need so many translations? But some of the nuances of the Biblical text that are evident in different translations make me think we will always need new translations. And I will keep adding them to my burgeoning collection. It’s kind of an addiction, but as addictions go, not a bad one.