Number of bibles you own

[jack]

Poll #4882 Bibles

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

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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

[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.