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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Some portions of the bible were written by a scribe who took dictation. Sometimes they took the pen to write something important in their own hand, (normally a closing), but most of it was not written this way.

Today we consider their writing formal. Was it that way then though? (I've never actually cared enough about the topic to see if history says anything more)

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Forget the Bible -- "take a letter please" was an almost stereotypical expression associated with executive types and their secretaries. Dictation to a human secretary was a more common form of "input" for the executive class than writing the letter oneself; personal computing was met with some resistance by corporate execs in the 70s and early 80s because you had to type at a PC to operate it, and typing was viewed as a skill used by secretaries, clerks, and other such minions.

The way that the Bible reads today, in English, after countless revisions and reformulations, translations and copyings, is so far removed from the original Greek or Aramaic that it's almost inconceivable that the words on the page are even close to what was written two thousand years ago.

The formality of the Bible in English can be in large part attributed to the King James version, and other versions of that time period, where you've got the turmoil of the reformation, with the English King as the head of the Anglican church in opposition to Rome, as well as a relatively tumultuous internal political climate, and so a lot of passages were tweaked around to reinforce royal authority.

Per Wikipedia the different New Testament texts have a 99.5% accuracy with each other, and the oldest existing manuscripts were written ~200 years after the original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism_of_the_New_T....

Modern translations are done based on analysis of the existing Greek manuscripts, not based on the KJV so any political meddling with the KJV doesn't affect the NIV, ESV or similar.

True but unhelpful, since Aramaic had riches and critical distinctions that have been dropped entirely or conflated on the way through low ancient Greek and into older English. For example, four or five different words with quite different meanings have all been rendered as "forgive" or "forgiveness" in the KJV translation making a contradictory and uninformative mess. (Philosophically speaking - it's still great if not entirely comprehensible poetry.) Given how central the Bible was to that concept, the KJV also impoverished our language, setting up an impossible problem for translators and helping to make us all much more ethically moronic than we'd otherwise be.

The manuscript evidence very strongly disagrees with you.

And how many revisions of editing (and translation) has the text gone through from the point of dictation to the current day when we consider it to have formal style? I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that even the scribe would perform significant amount of editing on the fly to construct reasonable structure.

I would also imagine that dictated language and spoken language are somewhat distinct categories, I would rather consider dictation to be an input method for writing rather than a form of spoken language, if that makes any sense. Sadly I don't have any background to actually claim this as a fact, maybe some linguist could chime in?

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