But I’ve figured out what to do when the margins get too full of notes and you have to get a new set to mark in..

Just dump the best of those notes from your old scriptures into your blog and you’ll have plenty of material to blog on for quite a while, and everyone else will benefit from your insight!

I keep the KJV mostly for its place in my heart, but I rarely read it. I think that the Gospels sound wonderful in KJV’s Elizabethan poetic language, but Paul is hard enough to follow as it is.

I do most of my reading in the New International Version, mostly because it is extremely, well, readable. It’s a contemporary translation without being too vernacular, and as far as widespread use goes, it’s definitely the Bible of choice for most American Christians.

I have an NRSV with apocrypha mostly because–as far as I understand–it is widely accepted by academics as one of the truest translations available. And it gets a lot of use in the mainline denominations, which is what I’m most interested in. On the other hand, I find it neither as readable as the NIV nor as beautiful as the KJV, so it’s not really my favorite to read.

I tossed my LDS edition of the Bible when I first started questioning the Church–I found the extensive footnotes distracting and too often felt they were misleading or loaded with specifically LDS doctrinal twists, and at that time I wanted to at least try and figure out what the Bible actually said for itself, not when seen through the lens of Mormonism.

I’d like to get a copy of the Message, which is a paraphrase, not a translation, but is pretty popular in Emergent circles. It’s definitely a different twist on the Bible, and while I certainly wouldn’t use it for study or any kind of rigorous exegisis, I wouldn;t mind having it for casual reading or for a fresh take.

I don’t make notes or markings in my scriptures much anymore, so that’s not really an issue. When I was active and believing Mormon, I had too many experiences where I wrote what at the time seemed like incredibly incisive notes, but later just didn’t make sense anymore. These days, if I have an insight I want to write down, I write it down somewhere else.

On my mission I got a cheap BoM and read it so frequently that it fell apart. When I got home, I had it spiral bound and used it in my BYU religion classes. I think that with Margret McConkie-Pope the state of my BoM was enough to earn me an A.

Since then I’ve worn out several sets of scriptures. My most long lasting is a BoM xeroxed on to regular sized sheets of paper to allow wide margins. It’s in a loose leaf binder allowing me to insert printouts of longer materials. At this point, it’s complete enough that I can teach BoM using it and my testimony only. Deseret Book- Please feel free to steal my idea. Even if it’s only the standard size printed page on the large format paper. We need wider margins!

But LDS editions? One is good ;)

I’ve had the fake leather cover to my bible reattached and have needed to do the same for my triple for years. They’re marked with my own drawings, inserts, questions and assorted combinations of blue, red and yellow and nothing else.

They’re black and grey on the edges from constant thumbing and don’t have tabs like I like. My other set has tabs and I hate that. They make me slower!>:)

My husband has tried to get me to use a PDA, but I won’t have it. I like the feel of the paper and the sound it makes…