joel's thoughts

[Background]
Two weeks ago, my family and I made a visit to our local Family Christian Store. I was there primarily to pick up the Casting Crowns CD [Snapshot review: tracks 2-4 are absolutely fabulous, the rest ranges from ‘good-thoughts’ to ‘eh’; overall musically solid but unremarkable, the strength is in the lyrics; really, tracks 2-4 alone are just about worth the price of the CD], but we ended up browsing for a bit anyway. I wandered over to the section with various bible translations and printings because I’ve been thinking about picking up one of those “thinline” bibles — softcover and very…well, thin. Since I went to Urbana ’96 I’ve been using the bible I got there, but I’ve been thinking I might like something that would fit a little easier in my laptop bag. Yes, I know, we Americans and our conveniences. Anyway, I was looking over the various shelves of King James and NIV and NASB and…ESV? English Standard Version, eh? What’s that about? I asked Andi if she knew anything about it, and she hadn’t heard of it either. I shrugged and made a mental note to find out about it at some point. Time was running short, so I paid for my CD and we left, and I hadn’t thought about the ESV since.

[Today]
I get to work after a weeklong vacation and get back in to my usual morning routine — check/sort/read email, check the news, check my blog list (keep meaning to post that sometime). Craig, one of my roommates from Messiah, had the following post:

Fab rock band Queen and Internet meme “All your Base are Belong to Us” [explanatory link added -joel] are combined as a Flash video in Zero Wing Rhapsody. You’ve been warned.

And really, the warning is appropriate. It was rather amusing, but…wow. Anyway, the credit screen at the end gives quite a bit of the production credit (including recording) to one Andrew Kepple, and I was immediately curious if it might be the same Dru Kepple who attended Lebanon Valley College while I was there in ’93 – ’95. We were both Sound Recording majors, had overlapping groups of friends, and as I recall we both had an interest in a certain violinist…but I digress.

Naturally I turned to Google to find out if there was any connection. “Andrew Kepple” turned up several links for the guy in the Zero Wing Rhapsody thing, including this page where a guy named Glutnix in New Zealand met him and took a few pictures. Checked the pix — nope, that’s not Dru. Oh well, I wonder what did happen to him? So I Google for “Dru Kepple” (since that’s what he always went by) and found this page for a guy named Shawn Smith and his band, which page mentions the onetime involvement of a Dru Kepple, who (it says) is now in PA being church organist, guitar instructor, and youth band leader. Yep, that’s the guy, and he’s not the other guy. End of story.

Except something on Glutnix’s page had caught my eye, and I wandered back to have another look. I saw “Christianity” in his categories list, with one post. Intrigued (remember I got here by a link from a search on some guy in that silly Zero Wing parody), I went to see what he had to say on the topic and was delighted to see somewhat of a review of the online edition of none other than the ESV! (I had overlooked his right-nav “about” block mentioning Jesus Christ as one of the things he’s passionate about.) So I made a mental note, forgot about it (as usual :P), and ended up here anyway, courtesy of Zero Wing. God indeed has a sense of humor. 🙂

So of course I followed the links and quickly discovered both esv.org (the main site) and gnpcb.org/esv (the online version), and I’m quite intrigued. I’m nowhere near a bible scholar, but it looks like their translation philosophy is pretty decent. It’s a fairly recent translation (copyright 2001) by Good News Publishers, built off of the Revised Standard Version (1971) as a starting point and relying on the 1983 and 1993 versions of the Masoretic (Hebrew) and Greek texts, respectively. And it aims to be an “essentially literal” translation, emphasizing as much as possible word-for-word correspondence, which I tend to prefer, rather than a more general “thought-for-thought” translation. I’ll have to give it some more thought and prayer, but it looks like I might have a winner…