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Worldly word:New Bible texts translate the Bible away
WORLD ^ | October 15, 2005 | Gene Edward Veith

Posted on 10/07/2005 8:38:02 AM PDT by Caleb1411

As evangelicals debate the inclusive-language Today's New International Version (TNIV), many liberal mainline churches have slipped far down the slippery slope in what they have done to the Bible.

In 1990, the National Council of Churches published the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), an inclusive-language rendition of the well-accepted Revised Standard Version (RSV). This translation keeps masculine references to God and to Jesus, but changes them for human beings, getting rid of the generic "man," putting "brothers and sisters" where the original just has "brothers," and using awkward plurals and repetitions to avoid the generic "he." Never mind that the messianic title "Son of Man" is now "a human being." What the NRSV did to the RSV is pretty much what the TNIV did to the NIV.

But that much inclusive language was not enough for many mainline churches. An Inclusive Language Lectionary, a rendition of Scripture texts read during the worship service, takes the next step of changing the gendered language for God. Today, the congregations who use this lectionary in Sunday worship pray to "our Father-Mother." Jesus is not the Son of God, but the "child of God." The pronoun "he" is not even used for the man Jesus, replaced with ungrammatical constructions: "Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us" becomes "Jesus Christ, who gave self for us" (Titus 2:13-14).

But that much tinkering proved not to be enough either. In 1995, Oxford University Press published the New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version. This revision of the NRSV not only uses gender-inclusive language for God and Jesus ("God our father-mother"), it also eliminates, in the words of the introduction, "all pejorative references to race, color, or religion, and all identifications of persons by their physical disability." In avoiding all "offensive language," "darkness" is changed to "night," lest it offend black people, and "the right hand of God" is changed to "the mighty hand of God," lest it offend left-handed people.

But that does not go far enough. The liberal Catholic group Priests for Equality published in 2004 the Inclusive Bible. "Kingdom" is both sexist and authoritarian, so the priests made up a new word, "kindom." Adam is not a "man," he is an "earth creature." And to avoid offending homosexuals or others in nontraditional relationships, the words "husband" and "wife" are changed to "partner."

But since radical theology depends on demonizing the "patriarchy" of the Bible, the Inclusive Bible includes footnotes admitting that "the actual Hebrew is even more brutal" and chastising the apostle Paul for his retrograde attitudes. Then the translators just change the text to something more suitable.

But the Inclusive Bible does not go far enough either. The Bible version Good as New: A Radical Retelling of the Scriptures uses what its introduction calls "cultural translation." Not only is it inclusive, it translates ancient terms into their modern-day equivalent. Thus, "demon possession" becomes "mental illness." Even names are changed: Peter, Nicodemus, and Bethsaida become "Rocky," "Ray," and "Fishtown." Religious terminology is eliminated, as not being in accord with our culture: "Baptize" is changed to "dip"; "salvation" is changed to "completeness."

The translation describes itself as "women, gay and sinner friendly." Thus, when Paul says that it is better to marry than to burn, the Inclusive Bible says, "If you know you have strong needs, get yourself a partner. Better than being frustrated." The Inclusive Bible follows the higher critics in leaving out the Pastoral Epistles and Revelation, and it follows The Da Vinci Code in including instead the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. This translation is endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the evangelical leader Tony Campolo.

But does any of this matter, as long as people are exposed to the Bible? Yes, it does. The bisexual deity "Father-Mother" is not the true God, nor is this made-up religion Christianity. These translations are not the Word of God. Just the Word of Man.


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: apostate; bible; christianity; heresy; heretic; moralabsolutes; purge; religiousleft; screwballs; screwytranslations; tniv
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To: Verginius Rufus
The text of the Gospel of Thomas was not available when the KJV was done.

ROFL!
Thank you!!! Anyone could have stated this at the very beginning. They chose to flame instead. Apparently, not many Christians know that.
.
221 posted on 10/08/2005 9:41:12 AM PDT by radioman
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To: radioman

"I don't think so, but then again, I'm not a Christian."

What does being a Christian or not have to do with it?

If God is powerless, he's not God so why bother with religion of ANY sort?

As to your other point, I am pulling the pre-Nicaea documents that refer to the Catholic Church, per your request.

My request of you is that you produce the documents whereby you can establish that the Church prior to Nicaea was NOT the Catholic Church, that the bishops who assembled there were not Catholic bishops.

Indeed, I would ask you to define what "Catholic" means, in the perspective you are using it.

What you have said, in effect, is that there was an original Christian religion, the Ebionites, and that the Catholic Church was made up out of whole-cloth in 325 AD.

I have already referred you to one key document: Bishop Eusebius' "History of the Church", much of which was written long before Nicaea. So, there is your first pre-Nicaean document establishing that the Church already existed, well, besides Paul's letter to Timothy.


222 posted on 10/08/2005 9:44:14 AM PDT by Vicomte13 (Et alors?)
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To: Caleb1411

LOL! Is this article really true?


223 posted on 10/08/2005 9:46:17 AM PDT by killjoy (Real Men Love Bush)
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To: Caleb1411

Deliberately mistranslating the Bible. That's something else.


224 posted on 10/08/2005 10:10:22 AM PDT by Republican Wildcat
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Comment #225 Removed by Moderator

To: Vicomte13
As to your other point, I am pulling the pre-Nicaea documents that refer to the Catholic Church, per your request

Thanks, I'm looking forward to reading them.

What you have said, in effect, is that there was an original Christian religion, the Ebionites, and that the Catholic Church was made up out of whole-cloth in 325 AD

Close. There were many Christian sects. The Romans took control and combined them into one. Those who refused to join the party were persecuted. Lets not forget that Roman Christians fed Nestorian Christians to the lions!

I have already referred you to one key document: Bishop Eusebius' "History of the Church", much of which was written long before Nicaea.

Wrong!
Eusebius was born in 265 AD. Nothing he wrote predates Nicaea. He was a Bishop of the Cæsarean creed before Nicaea. There were many Christian creeds, but no Catholics until after Nicaea.

None of this matters a hill of beans. The point is that many of those who quote the Bible know nothing about the book itself or the founding of the church.

My request of you is that you produce the documents whereby you can establish that the Church prior to Nicaea was NOT the Catholic Church

ROFL!
How would I do that? There are no documents that refer to the Catholic church before Nicaea. It is up to those who claim there was a Catholic church in the first or second century to prove that claim!

Indeed, I would ask you to define what "Catholic" means, in the perspective you are using it

I know the meaning of the Greek word "catholic", but it is not up to me to define your religion. The claim was made that the Catholic church is the original Christian church. All I asked for was proof of that, and I have seen no proof yet.
. .
226 posted on 10/08/2005 10:26:46 AM PDT by radioman
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Comment #227 Removed by Moderator

To: Bahbah; Galactic Overlord-In-Chief

It sounds like 4kids got a hold of the bible.


228 posted on 10/08/2005 10:49:07 AM PDT by Sofa King (MY rights are not subject to YOUR approval.)
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To: craig_eddy

Correct. A translation must faithfully replicate the original language and the author's intent. This pro-queer bit of lunacy is no Bible at all. It is nothing but a modernist abomination.


229 posted on 10/08/2005 10:57:40 AM PDT by attiladhun2
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To: radioman

No, not wrong about Eusebius.

Do yourself a favor, get a copy, and read the historical notes at the front of it.

He began his work on his history of the Church in the 290s, in his mid- to late-20s.

Obviously the final chapters, in which he extols Constantine to high heaven etc. were not completed until Constantine took power. But that the later parts of the history were written after Constantine does change the earlier provenance of the earlier parts.

That there were many Christian sects is indisputably true.
And that the Catholic Church struggled against those other sects, or - if you prefer - was one of many sects and just ended up being the one that won out, is also true. But that particular shoot that became "the Romans" (I would dispute that. The Roman Catholic Church is only the Western, Latin Church. The Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church, such as the Marionites, are very ancient, very Catholic, and not a bit "Roman") was one of them that was there from the beginning.

If you are arguing that the Catholic Church was not really "catholic" (because there were many sects, because persecuted, etc.), and that the assertion that IT was the orthodox branch of Christianity and all others were heresies was its own propaganda - that is a position that can be debated, I think. I think that, once examined, it will prove to have been the BIGGEST of the various sects, but that would not vitiate the basic point that there were other Christian sects going all the way back to the First Century. I won't dispute that, because it's true.
But you seem to be saying that that which became the Catholic Church (as you define it), the root of orthodoxy (as the Catholics would define it) was NOT an original Christian sect, did NOT date from the First Century, and did not always claim that it was the true orthodox and catholic Church. Thus the assertion: "The Catholic Church did not exist until the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD."

To me, that sounds like the Catholic Church was a confection made up out of wholecloth in the early 300s, and that's not the case.

But I suppose we can save that discussion until I have provided you the references.

I can already see where this is going to go, though.
Your absolute assertion "WRONG!" on Eusebius, followed up by the assertion that Eusebius wrote everything in his history post-Nicaea, is going to no doubt be the pattern.

But,you know what? Even if Eusebius wrote every word post-Nicaea (he didn't, but even if he did) - he was still writing about the centuries before. Unless your assertion is that he made everything up, made up all the history, made up all the documents he referred to (many of which we do not have today) - made up everything out of whole cloth, and that this complete novelistic confection was accepted because everyone had massive amnesia and he was able to write history on a blank slate...well...you know that's bunkum.

At this point, there's no point going back and forth on unseen documents. I need to give you the references.

Asking you to prove there was no Catholic Church is not asking you to prove a negative at all. Rather, it is asking you to produce the EQUIVALENT of Eusebius for other Christian sects, the sort of detailed, continuous history that shows that they were there, robust and long-lasting.

To take a different time period, nobody can dispute that there was a Catholic Church in the 1500s. But also nobody can dispute that there was a Lutheran Church, and that there came to be an Anglican Church, because there are extensive documents and histories from all of these religions from that period. The thick documentation tells us that there were several strong traditions.

There's good documentation for a continous Catholic community of believers going back to the time of Christ.
Which demonstrates that, whatever other sects there were or weren't, the Catholic Church was not a confection created after 325 AD.


230 posted on 10/08/2005 12:01:14 PM PDT by Vicomte13 (Et alors?)
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To: attiladhun2

"A translation must faithfully replicate the original language and the author's intent. This pro-queer bit of lunacy is no Bible at all. It is nothing but a modernist abomination."

And that's tough to do, because of the change of idiom, etc., over the ages, and the inaccessibility of native speakers of ancient Greek or ancient Hebrew. There are Ancient Greek and Hebrew scholars, of course, by they, too, learned these ancient languages as second languages, and don't have (and can't get) the precise cultural reference points to make a translation.

Indeed, one of the reasons why Jerome's Vulgate is such an important piece of work is that he was able to write in Latin and read the Greek within the context of the ancient cultures in which he lived that read, spoke and lived it. So, when there were choices to be made, he was actually a man of that culture, and was able to make a choice based on the internal reference point which only a native speaker, native to the culture can have. There are no native speakers of ancient Greek in the world, but even if there were, there's nobody in the world today that grew up in the Roman Empire, who simply knew directly what the inferences of things were, in that context.

In other words, a translation is but an echo, but the truth is that even if you teach yourself ancient Greek and Hebrew, you're still only getting an echo of the ancient meaning, because a learned language is still not a native language, and the mind might be able to read the ancient words directly in that language, but it still sorts out their meaning through the prism of modern experience.

I should not put too much weight on slight differences in good, scholarly translations. The problem, for example, with the old KJV versus the Douai version isn't that either of them say anything different of substance, only that there are some books not in the KJV that are in the Douai, and the relative literary quality of the KJV is higher than the Douai. Likewise, the modern Catholic NAB is no literary treasure, at all. It is blunt and does not make an effort to be linguistically inspiring (and it ISN'T).
But if you set it alongside an NIV a KJV and a Douai, all four of those things translate it straight. Some are more poetic than others, but they are not shucking and jiving.
By contrast, set the Jehovah's Witnesses' New World Bible alongside them, and you'll read that, in the beginning, the Word was with God and the word was a god, and the Word became flesh.

And that decapitalized word and that article are theological choices, not translation choices.


231 posted on 10/08/2005 12:12:05 PM PDT by Vicomte13 (Et alors?)
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To: radioman
I've never heard of Roman Christians feeding any Nestorians to the lions. Nestorius was Patriarch of Constantinople from 428 to 431 and came out of the Syrian theological tradition. He got into trouble for objecting to calling Mary "Theotokos" (Mother of God) because, as he put it, "God is not a baby two or three months old." His enemies (especially St. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria) got him removed as patriarch and exiled to a remote monastery.

His followers, the Nestorians, were mainly found in the Middle East (and some Christian groups in the Middle East today derive from them). I doubt anyone in Rome ever encountered any of them, let alone threw them to the lions.

232 posted on 10/08/2005 12:15:53 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: Verginius Rufus

Come to think of it, I think that the Christians ended the arena business and feeding people to the lions and such, because it had been done to them so viciously.

If I remember right, there was some legal persecution (of course: there always is when things change), but the Christians didn't go for the Roman "mass-torture-as-public-entertainment" bit.


233 posted on 10/08/2005 1:55:21 PM PDT by Vicomte13 (Et alors?)
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To: radioman
Isn't the Gospel of Thomas the only Gospel written while Jesus was alive and preaching?

No.

234 posted on 10/08/2005 4:02:08 PM PDT by NoCmpromiz (I'm from the government, I'm here to help you. (One of the 3 biggest lies...))
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To: Sans-Culotte
The pastor at the Presbyterian USA church of which my wife and I are members has already started inserting the Father-Mother thing.

I didn't check to see what state you are in, but there is within the PCUSA what is known as the Confessing Church movement. Check out the link below, and maybe there is a member church near you....

The Confessing Church Movement

(I am a member of a Confessing Church within the extremely liberal Presbytery of the Hudson River. It's good to know that not every PCUSA church is a bunch of lib wackos!)

235 posted on 10/08/2005 4:33:46 PM PDT by NoCmpromiz (What part of John 14:6 don't you get?)
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To: Sans-Culotte
Oooops... Sorry, I didn't read your tagline... Here's the link for churches in Texas:

Confessing Church - Texas

236 posted on 10/08/2005 4:44:38 PM PDT by NoCmpromiz (What part of John 14:6 don't you get?)
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To: RobertP
Give me the King James Version any day.

Amen!!

237 posted on 10/08/2005 4:49:10 PM PDT by mafree
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To: Ruy Dias de Bivar
Again I ask my question... In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus said he would preach to Mary and she would become a man. Did she? if not, why do you keep bringing up this piece of drivel?

Good one. I waited for a reply from Radioman. And waited. And... The shout of his reply is ... deafening ;-)

238 posted on 10/08/2005 4:59:08 PM PDT by NoCmpromiz (What part of John 14:6 don't you get?)
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To: xzins
They're not serious, are they? Is this satire? Does anyone know if this is true?

Not satire. This so called translation actually exists. The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams did write the forward. Don't know if that constitutes an endorsement or not, but I can't picture writing a forward for a work that I didn't approve of... As far as Campolo, I haven't yet found a link, but he has been getting flakier and flakier as the years go by. Here are some links to comments about this 'translation':

Bible Researcher

Apologetics Press

And this from a liberal viewpoint... Nimble Spirit
(I've never run into a liberal Mennonite before..)

239 posted on 10/08/2005 5:33:25 PM PDT by NoCmpromiz (What part of John 14:6 don't you get?)
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To: SmartCitizen; Vicomte13; Verginius Rufus; Sans-Culotte; Ruy Dias de Bivar
(The Gospel of Thomas) was NEVER taken seriously by any of the church fathers and was NOT included in the canon of scripture. And the reason is simple - it is inconsistent with NT themes and teachings.

Found this reference as to the Canon, worth the read...

The Canon and Extra-Canonical Writings

240 posted on 10/08/2005 6:11:24 PM PDT by NoCmpromiz (What part of John 14:6 don't you get?)
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