Saturday, January 8, 2011

The Tragedy in "The Book of Eli"

I watched The Book of Eli because BARM's Justyn M. recommended it in one of the threads. I do admire some elements of the film:
  • It calls us back to Bible reading. Eli read it everyday.
  • It calls us back to Scripture memorization.Eli dictates the whole English Bible to a secretary from his memory.
  • I like Eli's strong conviction like the way he resisted the temptation of Solara
  • It reminds me of Pastor Jun Malazo's teaching that we are immortal until the work assigned to us is finished. Eli was supernaturally bullet-proof until the later part of the film.
But it did not solve a large problem. Its tragic because in the film, the Hebrew and Greek texts were lost forever!

The tragedy is aggravated further because the bible that will be used in the new world will be the NKJV (which Eli mistakenly calls the KJV!!!).

"The only reason for retaining the NKJV is if you are among the less than one-tenth of one percent of all textual critics in the world who actually think the KJV and NKJV did use the better manuscripts... Time to put the NKJV on the shelf if you own one and get a modern translation that uses an accurate textual base." (-Craig Blomberg)

"... the NKJV revisers eliminated the best feature of the KJV (its marvelous expression of the English language) and kept the worst (its flawed text)... This is why for study you should use almost any modern translation rather than the KJV or the NKJV." (-Gordon Fee)

No comments:

Post a Comment