Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Sunday October 25, 2009

Conservative Bible project reveals Christian split

By Jim Taylor

Biblical preferences
        Evangelicals have always favoured the King James Version, translated from Latin in 1611. When the Authorized Version came out in 1901, it was denounced as “the work of the devil.” The Revised Standard Version, in 1949, and the New Revised Standard Version, 40 years later, came in for similar criticism.
        However, evangelicals took to their heart the New International Version, published in 1978. It differed little from the RSV and NRSV, according to linguistics professor Alan Gleason of the University of Toronto. But it was translated by scholars who had impeccable evangelical credentials.
        The NIV has sold some 300 million copies. But it is scheduled for revision in 2011. Almost certainly, the new version will be simpler, less male oriented.
        Conservapedia wants to reverse that trend. Its Bible would abolish gender-inclusive euphemisms. It would include a free-market interpretations of Jesus’ parables. It would restore an emphasis on hell.
        It would eliminate socialist allusions such as the word “comrade” – clearly a Communist influence.
        “Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible,” states the Conservapedia website. “This improperly encourages the ’social justice’ movement among Christians.”
        And it would exclude “later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story” [in John 8:1-11].

Limited understanding
        It would be easy to make fun of the Conservapedia project.
        Founder Andrew Schlafly apparently doesn’t understand the difference between a translation and a paraphrase. He proposes that an army of volunteers could simply revise the text of the King James Version – in accordance with his principles, of course – at “a careful rate of four verses an hour.”
        He also seems unfamiliar with the Bible itself. For instance, he questions the authenticity of Jesus’ statement from the cross: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
        I suspect that what he really dislikes is the focus on forgiveness. But his rationale argues that because these words appear only in one gospel, they must be suspect.
        About the only common elements that all four gospels include are the cross and the names of Jesus, Pontius Pilate, Herod, and a few disciples.

Liberal biases
        Nevertheless, Schlafly is right about one thing. Contemporary versions of the Bible do reflect a liberal bias. Liberal revisers, however, rarely recognize their emphasis on gender equality, social justice, and economic fairness as ideologies. They believe these attitudes are mandated by the biblical message itself.
        Translators can’t avoid introducing their own biases. English has one word “blue”; Russian has two – one for light blue, the other for dark blue. Which should a translator choose?
        Hebrew “ruach” and Greek “pneuma” have three possible meanings – breath, wind, and spirit. So did a wind blow across the waters of creation? Or a breath of life? Or the spirit of God?
        The King James Version that Schlafly proposes to use as his “public domain” base, and that Marc Grizzard considers the only true Bible, has already gone through at least three translations – into English from Latin, which was translated from Greek, much of which came from Hebrew.
        As our ethical understandings have changed, liberal translators have tended to replace exclusive terms like man, brothers, or father with gender-neutral terms – people, family, parent… In some cases, they restored an original generic description violated by the patriarchal bias of earlier translators. In others, they have deliberately introduced a non-specific description that, they believed, more closely reflected the original intention.
        The conservative side at least admits that it promotes a particular ideology.

Two churches
        One effect of this new translation, however, will be that the Christian church will no longer share the same Bible.
        To some extent, that has happened already. Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Bibles place their books in a different order. Roman Catholic Bibles number some psalms differently.
        However much I dislike the idea of a specifically Conservative Bible, the concept may acknowledge the split that is already occurring among Christians. As long as liberal and conservative Christians used the same Bible, even in different translations, they appeared to belong to the same church.
        Separate Bibles will make the split obvious.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn



A couple of people wrote to me about last week’s column, singling out my comments about the GDP or the Stock Exchange Indexes being used as our measure of collective happiness. But from there on, they mostly economic statistics to prove how unhappy we were – which wasn’t quite my point.

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About My Paraphrases

Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
        At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
        My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
        About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
        I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
        I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.

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