After blood again? I suppose you want to eat Jesus’ flesh. You are sick. Pray for healing from your barbarism.
As with all things you talk about Xfrodo you know next to nothing about what UK christianity is. Most English christians are Anglicans or Methodists of one sort or another with a large Catholic minority. A brief guide to Anglican Theology can be found in the '39 Articles of the Church of England.' You will find them in the 'Book of Common Prayer;' Liberal they ain't.
That said, most Welsh are Methodists of one sort or another and conduct services in their own language and shut the pubs on Sundays. The Scots make do without Bishops and are mainly Presbyterian but split into innumerable groups of idiocy some even more extreme than your lot.
I come from NW Scotland and knew a man from Gairloch on the west coast who took pills on a Saturday to make sure he was constipated on a Sunday. He was terrified of doing work (wiping his arse) on the Sabbath. Yup Gairloch Presbyterians would throw you out Xfrodo as a radical leftist liberal.
The Church of England in England has various sections from low church (lower than methodists) through the larger 'broad' church into high church and Anglo Catholic traditions. They have a lot of women priests in the low and broad church. You of course would be in agreement with the Catholics about women in the church.
And then there is the Southwark Diocese but the least said about them the better.
That's all for now, hope it helps.
Bears repeating.
I'll come back later to this but haven't time for explanation now.There are many different Bibles - There is a big wiki article which summarises them. The Ge'ez Bible for example has 81 books.
The biggest translation difference is that protestant churches generally prefer the Masoretic (9th century AD Hebrew) as an original text to the 2nd century BC text of the Greek Septuagint, which Catholics and Eastern Churches followed. Recent discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls now suggest that the Septuagint translation from the Hebrew was in fact more original and accurate than the Masoretic Hebrew, which is of course much later.
The KJV is a great work of literature but not the best translation at all. Don't ignore it but read it together with any of the more modern fairly literal translations (post RSV) Read together, understanding is much simpler. The basic problem with the KJV is that it was commissioned to reflect the views of the established Anglican church and is excessively authoritarian in style. For example it always translates what should be 'congregation or meeting' as 'church'
Not much difference apparently but the former implies a ground up fairly democratic organization whereas the latter supports an authoritarian top down approach to governance.
Finally, just a small task for fun. Try to find the word sin in any of the original language texts. When one considers how important sin sinning and sinners are to all the major churches, Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, its presence or absence is more than a little important.
Sorry. Messed up post
73 million Christian people of the Orthodox Tewahedo faith use the Ge'ez Bible, mainly in N.E.Africa, centred in Ethiopia. It along with the Coptic Bible of Egypt (22 million people) were very early versions originating more than 1000 years before the KJV that you use. There is some evidence that parts of the Ge'ez OT dates directly from pre Christian Hebrew sources but it is much more likely that the Greek Septuagint, also (pre - Christian) was their main OT source.
There is very significant additional material in the Ge'ez NT. There is also a very interesting omission - there is no resurrection story at all in the Ge'ez gospel of Mark. This is especially interesting given Western Christianity's difficulties with the end of Mark's gospel.
I will see if I can attach the wiki article listing the various and different canons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
The tables in this article make it very clear that these are not merely different translations but these different Bibles have very different content as well. I can see from a literalists point of view that presents a major problem because which version is true; the English KJV translated from poor Greek and solid Latin sources (also from Greek and 9th century Hebrew)1600 years later, or a 3rd/4th century Ge'ez source translated from original Koine Greek and Septuagint sources.
There are no easy answers.
But the Masoretic text is the accepted Hebrew Canon whereas the Mesoatis you mention is the name of a modern Greek Supermarket.
One day - maybe - if I have a month or so to spare, I will do a brief piece on the translation errors - plus both accidental and deliberate editorial changes.
