Bibles

This is an explanation designed to accompany the “bible” tag on my LibraryThing.

Bible, biblical, Testaments
I have a collection of 29 Bibles and biblical paraphrases to date. These are tagged both “Bible”, and “Biblical”, the “Biblical” tag referring to other books about the bible, and the “Bible” tag being reserved for Bibles, books of the Bible, and biblical paraphrases. According to the contents of the specific volume Bibles are also tagged “Old Testament”, “New Testament”, and “Apocrypha”. This does not mean the entire testament or section is included, only that the book draws from one or more of those sections. So a book containing only Esdras would be tagged “Old Testament”, a “full bible” would be tagged with all three. The “Psalms” tag I have used differently, I have used this to tag books which contain Psalms, btu not any over part of the Old Testament, in practice my two Gideons.
There are three works with the tag “extra canonical”, one of these is Good as New and also has the “Bible” tag, as it also contains books from the canon*, the other two, being editions of the Dead Sea, and Nag Hammadi scriptures are not included in my Bible count, but they are tagged “biblical”.

Paraphrase
Amongst my Bibles I further divide with the tag “Paraphrase”. What is and is not a paraphrase is obviously a judgement call. It was easy to make that decision in the case of the Good As New, or Enid Blyton’s Bible for Children. There are some who would not think of The Message as a paraphrase, I do, although I am coloured by the value judgement I make regarding it. On the other hand there are some who would say that the Good News Bible, being more of a sense than a word translation is Paraphristic. I disagree. I have chosen not to try and divide Sense and Word translations in the tagging structure.

Translations
I have tagged translations in order to group them, tagging, so far, only the non paraphristic bibles. I have:
2 “English Standard Version”
1 ”Good News Bible”,
3 ”King James Version”,
3 “New English Bible”
3 “New International Version”
3 “Revised Standard Version”

Special Note
The two gems in my collection are two particularly substantial bibles, one a particularly large leather bound New English Bible, the other a King James Version, which was presented in 1876 to Miss M.A. Thomas. Both were made available to any good home by the Religious Studies department of Bradford Grammar School. I must offer thanks to the gentleman who made the latter available to me, despite his earlier claim to it.
Also unusual is the parallel translation of the 1611(Authorised) and 1881(Revised) versions, which was published in 1882. Unfortunately it is an unlovely book, made from plates about half the size of the paper sheets used.

* See Article VI of the 39 Articles, for instance.