Number of bibles you own

[jack]

Poll #4882 Bibles

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 26

View Respondents

How many bibles do you own

View Answers
Mean: 3.35 Median: 2 Std. Dev 3.04

0		2 (7.7%)
1		6 (23.1%)
2		7 (26.9%)
3		2 (7.7%)
4		3 (11.5%)
5		1 (3.8%)
6		1 (3.8%)
7		1 (3.8%)
8		0 (0.0%)
9		0 (0.0%)
10		2 (7.7%)
11		1 (3.8%)
12		0 (0.0%)
13		0 (0.0%)
14		0 (0.0%)
15		0 (0.0%)

Comments

[nanaya]

I'm not completely sure so I've guessed at 4 in the household. That doesn't include other Bible-related books, of corse.

[lavendersparkle]

If you included all of the Bibles in the house, mine would have been a lot higher. I said I owned 4, but there are an additional 2 I borrowed and haven't gotten around to giving back yet and Alec has an additional 8.

[nanaya]

Well, you're professionals. That's fair.

[simont]

Do electronic copies count?

[jack]

If it's on your computer. I don't think going to bible.com counts :)

[simont]

OK. In that case I voted 2, because I have two electronic copies (yes, on my own computer) of different translations, but no paper copy at all.

(For electronic copies it seemed sensible to count usefully distinct copies rather than any old copies, so the copies of those two on my four backup disks don't count, and I didn't even bother trying to remember whether I have bible-kjv installed on more than one Debian box. It feels slightly odd that for paper copies one would obviously have had to count duplicates of the same translation, but there we go.)

[jack]

Thank you. Yes, I think that's obviously the sensible way to count. And I agree it's interesting that it's different between real and electronic, but it's obviously the only way to do it. (If you'd deliberately acquired two separate kjv versions for some reason, I might consider them different, but even then probably not.) And thank you for choosing a sensible approach rather than bothering me to do it :)

[redaloud.livejournal.com]

I was going to ask the same question. Simon's response sounds sensible.

[tig_b]

OK 1 Bible.

Plus the large quantity of Baha'i books, some Hindu and Buddhist scripture and several interfaith/multifaith books with excerpts from at least 9 religions.

[jack]

:) I nearly had a separate question for other religious volumes, but decided not to as I wasn't sure how to count them. I could do a follow-up question. (I imagine a Talmud wouldn't count, which is good because it comes in LOTS of volumes. And a Torah would, but is a slightly different question.)

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

*counts* ... 10 and a half between us (the half being a New Testament). More if you count electronic copies - AFAIK, one on each of our PDAs and one on my computer.

[jack]

:) I debated specifying how to count gospels and single testaments, but I decided to leave it to people's judgement :)

[angelofthenorth]

Well testaments I tend to count as one bible because they are a collection of books. So my Gospels count, but not my single Mark.

11 may be conservative.

[lnr]

Oh yes, I think I have a single gospel (Mark or Luke?) from OICCU too.

[jack]

Perhaps we should count separate volumes of NT or OT, but not both?

[emperor]

I think. I've not counted them.

[andrewducker]

Had one until recently, when I was having a clearout of "books I will never read ever again." and then it went to the charity shop.

(Not that I've read it end-to-end ever, but it was handy to have as a reference until the internets came along.)

[jack]

It's funny, it's one of the few reference books I do want to keep physical, even though I very rarely actually use it.

[wildeabandon]

There are several more in the house, but they're all Robert's

[lnr]

I have at least one full bible (Christening present) and one NT (Gideons) - but should I count that as 1 or 2? I don't think there are any other copies in the house.

[simont]

It's interesting that several people have mentioned standalone copies of the NT. I've never heard of them before, and it wouldn't even have occurred to me that such a thing might exist!

(Though I do know that separately bound copies of individual gospels have been known to exist; IIRC while I was at university the Christian Union made a pest of itself by leaving a John in lots of people's pigeonholes.)

[pseudomonas]

I counted a standalone Hebrew bible and standalone greek NT as one between them.

[jack]

I thought an old and new testament should count as one above, but I think if they've different translation paths, I'd go ahead and count them as different.

[pseudomonas]

They're untranslated.

[jack]

Oops, I think I meant to count them as separate in your case, but also in other cases where the language was relevant, but not necessarily if, say, one were a modern English translation and one a modern French translation.

[jack]

Me too. I feel embarrassed, because obviously if you're very Jesus-oriented, you would extremely likely do that, and many Christians are very Jesus-oriented. But it hadn't really occurred to me.

I debated individual gospels too. The one I had really annoyed me; though I appreciated the sentiment of giving me an easily accessible bible, I felt deceived that it looked accessible, and yet I could tell all those friendly excerpted quotes lacked a lot of comparative religious commentary and historical context.

[simont]

Mmm. My immediate thought about a standalone NT was 'that's like checking out the up-to-date source code without also cloning the git history!'.

(In which analogy, of course, the Jews run the original repository from which the Christians forked in order to do substantial refactoring, and haven't considered any of their work fit to be accepted upstream :-)

And, of course, people do check out source code without making a local clone of the history, if they're confident that when they do need the history they'll be able to find it elsewhere, and perhaps also that they won't need it often enough for the added inconvenience of doing so to be a serious problem. So yeah, standalone NT, I suppose so: if you don't mind going to the library (or, these days, looking on the Internet) on the rare occasion that you want to check a back-reference, then why not save the shelf space and printing cost?

I suppose it might have failed to occur to me because from my point of view a Bible is primarily something to which literary allusions are made, and since a lot of literary allusion is to the OT since that's where a lot of the memorable narrative bits are, you 'obviously' wouldn't want to be without it.

[liv]

I think I am a little bit in love with this metaphor :-)

[jack]

It's great. I should clarify that "git" is a source control program, not a derogatory term for Jesus :)

[jack]

Yeah, good description :) In fact, it occurs to me I very rarely read anything other than the first half of both testaments.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't refactoring imply changing the files the Jews had (the OT books)? Christians don't alter the content of the OT books, they add the NT to the set of books they consider canonical.

[forestofglory]

I was given a copy of the NT by an evangelist once. It might still be around somewhere. It was green and printed on supper thin paper -- so as to be pocket sized.

[leora]

Due to the size and expense of books in Braille, it is standard for books of the Bible to be sold in pieces. To buy the entire Bible in Braille is extremely expensive and would take up a great deal of space. (The paper has to be much thicker to hold the dots.) This is obviously not the typical reason why this is done, but I just figured I'd mention it, since it came up when I was shopping for Braille books.

[auntsarentgents]

Not that it has ever been used...

[pseudomonas]

I have an electronic copy (KJV), paper KJV, Hebrew/English (JPS) Tanach, Hebrew Tanach, Greek NT, Greek LXX, a Fox Pentateuch (in London), and a couple of concordances (Young's and Strong's, both in London).

[liv]

Actually, surprisingly few. I don't own any English language Bibles at the moment, and I have no copies of the New Testament at all, except in the cloud. I have one little Tanach, that is to say the OT purely in Hebrew, which I bought for reasons of size and cheapness as a more or less pocket copy. I think I probably have similar on the CD which lethargic_man made from me by downloading the whole of a repository of Jewish texts from an Israeli website, but I didn't count that separately.

Lots and lots of editions of the Pentateuch in Hebrew, English, parallel text, with or without commentary, but I can't really count Genesis through Deuteronomy as a whole Bible. All the moving I've been doing recently has led me to rely on Bible Gateway any time I need to look something up in English or grep the text. I should probably rectify that; a physical KJV is the kind of thing one ought to own, I think.

[forestofglory]

I have volume of Pentateuch and Haftorahs, does that count? (I acquired it when a friends shul was upgrading editions.)

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

In light of your subsequent post explaining the inspiration for the poll, I suppose I should add that my one copy of the Bible is in Latin (Vulgate).

[mathcathy]

I have one in English and one in Hungarian.

[ewx]

I counted all the electronic copies of the KJV here as one. Usually I refer to biblos.com these days as it provides easy access to ancient versions.

[leora]

Define "Bible". Define "own". I personally have my prayerbook I was given for my Bat Mitzvah and my Bible. My partner collects Bibles (he's hoping to eventually own enough to build a fort out of them) and has many... I haven't counted, but we have a Bible shelf on the bookcase that has nothing but Bibles, the Strunk & White, possibly one other thing that was thematically similar, and a few other religious books, such as my prayer book, and a Book of Mormon (which may or may not be on that shelf, it depends on whether or not it fits). The house has more religious books than that, as my other housemate owns a few books that include things like Asimov's Guide to the Bible, he probably has a Koran around somewhere if it hasn't been lost in a move, a Bible or two (he has one of the nifty red-letter ones somewhere, which I think is kind of neat).

So, the house has ~many~. Although most of them are just the standard ones you see in hotels, but in a nice collection of colors. (The eventual fort-building blocks.) But I only have one. I'd actually like a decent translation of the Torah+commentary, but I do not own one.

[chess]

this question is nontrivial, as I am not sure whether you want to know how many are specifically mine (4, I think, although I'm not sure of the current location of two of them) or how many I at least co-own (um, about 10, I'm not going to go and count them)...

[chess]

(also I _actually_ use http://www.biblegateway.com/ for 90% of my bible-looking-at needs...)

[chess]

oh, and there is one more I used to own and theoretically might be around somewhere but I haven't seen for quite some time now and is very likely entirely lost.

and I had some electronic copies, but the last one in a known location was trapped in a dead Psion and probably on a backup disk somewhere rather than in any accessible location.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I have 18 distinct copies on my computer (which includes the LOLcat translation...) and about 8 bibles on my bookshelf (although there is some duplication of translation).

I didn't fill in the poll because it stopped at 8 :-)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I mean ... stopped at 15!

[rcv1.livejournal.com]

Best part of a fair few. There were 6 on the first bookshelf I looked at, so probably a couple more elsewhere!