Promise-breakers
Really.
The people who do the New International Version (translation) of the bible have taken out the pesky “too liberal” gender-neutral language they wickedly and liberally stuck into the 2005 edition, because the knuckle-draggers were pissed off at them.
They’ve retained some of the language of the 2005 edition. But they also made changes — like going back to using words like “mankind” and “man” instead of “human beings” and “people” — in order to appease critics.
And the critics were pissed off by that because…what? Because they want everyone to think that human beings and people are in fact men and that women don’t count because they’re some kind of weird abberration? Or what? What other possible reason is there to object to language that is actually more precise and accurate and explanatory than the alternative?
Today, the Committee on Bible Translation, which translated the NIV, admits Today’s New International Version, the revision released in 2002, was a mistake. They substituted “brothers and sisters” where the New Testament writers used “brothers.”
They also broke a promise they’d made to James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, John Piper, pastor of Minneapolis megachurch Bethlehem Baptist, and other conservative pastors, not to produce a gender-inclusive NIV.
Thus reminding us that, in the words of the old proverb, yes God does hate women.
Well, if Dobson and Piper made them promise NOT to make it gender-inclusive….thats completely understandable.
And yet-
Of course they object to making it gender-inclusive- because it isn’t and never has been. They like it that way.
I suppose it would be like making Tom Sawyer speak grammatically, or something.
I can’t say I totally disagree with them For better or for worse, they’re supposed to be accurately translating the book (warts and all. Modifying it to match some 21st century sensibility does indeed fit into embarrassing political correctness
Shall we rewrite Ulysses adventures to include matching numbers of male and female characters? Rewrite Shakespeare to remove antiSemitism?
Hell, we should be glad they keep this stuff in the Bible, so people can see what it’s really made of.
Indeed. I remember Gary Wills making this argument years ago (maybe when they were last working on the NIV). The God of scripture does hate women, and this is something that anyone who claims to be guided by scripture should be forced to deal with.
Please, join the twenty-first century, we’re no longer so liberal, we’re theocratic! Get with the times!
True enough, but are we sure “mankind” and “man” for “people” and “human beings” is an accurate translation? That’s certainly not universal in all languages.
> For better or for worse, they’re supposed
> to be accurately translating the book (warts
> and all. Modifying it to match some 21st century
> sensibility does indeed fit into embarrassing
> political correctness
Yes, but what kind of warts are actually in the original? People (heh) seem to take for granted that the Bible uses language that excludes females, and I don’t really doubt it, but to be accurate, I don’t know; I don’t read Hebrew or Aramaic or anything like ’em.
But I do remember in my fundie church’s youth group learning that the word that is translated as “father”–as in “Our father, who art in heaven”–actually means “parent” or something like it, and could be either male or female. In the earthy-crunchy seventies, there was a vogue among teenagers for praying to “Our father and mother, who art in heaven”. (The grownups didn’t like it. When you’re raised in a fundamentalist church, you get your fun where you can.)
I don’t know if that bit about the mistranslation of ‘father’ is true. But there is at least room for doubt about whether the version that people assume is correctly translated, is. Most people have heard that the translaters of the King James version stuck in the stuff about not suffering witches to live because King James didn’t like witches. I see no reason to suppose that anything translated by that bunch (one member of which, a chap conveniently named Abbot, stands in bronze in the town nearest to where I’m sitting as I write) is accurately translated.
The original is probably sexist as all get-out. Like I said, I can’t read the original. And I don’t even know whether the original languages have gendered nouns, I mean, were the originals in French, we wouldn’t translate all the nouns with their genders, so that “tables” would be translate as (I dunno, I don’t read French, either, so let’s say it’s female) “female tables” and “chairs” be translated as “male chairs”.
I don’t have a major bone to pick here, but I quibble with the assumption that what’s out there now *is* accurate and that translating otherwise is pandering to 21st-century sensibilities. What’s out there very like is pandering to early 17th-century sensibilities!
Snap, Mary Ellen!
The analogy between Ulysses and the BIble doesn’t hold up. Nobody considers Ulysses holy, or representative of a community’s ideals or principles. If they did, they would have to make it in line with modern norms of equality. These modern norms are what jay dismissively calls “political correctness” (a meaningless, sneering term that adds nothing to any discussion), and they include the notion that women are people.
Well, correction: people don’t HAVE to make holy books in line with modern norms. But if they’re going to have holy books at all, then I’d rather they did so.
I’m glad to hear the NIV committee will be returning to original verses and dispensing with politically motivated changes. I eagerly await the next edition of the NIV which I assume will reinstate the original text’s “young woman” in place of the virgin of mistranslation.
Well, Mary Ellen, the words used are
which, when translated, means ‘Our father’, and, in general, the language of the New Testament tends to be weighted in favour of the masculine. As for the translation ‘young woman’ instead of ‘virgin’, Chris, the Greek word which translates Isaiah’s ‘young woman’ is the Greek word ‘παρθένος’ which does mean ‘virgin’, and I daresay that the Septuagint version of the Old Testament (from which the evangelists worked) will have the same word.
In any event, translations are interpretations. What translators have tried to do is to make the Bible as ‘modern’ as possible, so that it’s burrs and spines don’t show so readily. We should be glad that the benighted fundamentalists want the Bible with all its most objectionable parts showing, for it shows just how far we have come since the words were written.
Translating the Bible in such a way as to show its warts should make it less acceptable to more people. One of the things that reworking the liturgy in modern language did was to bring attention to bear on what was actually being said. The Prayer Book of Edward VI has very sonorous English, and you could just forget the meaning and listen to the sound of the language. Rework it in modern English and all the most superstitious passages actually seem, not beautiful and Ellizabethan, but a bit foolish. That’s why the pope wants to go back to Latin, after all. Not because of an attachment to tradition so much as an attachment to ‘mystery,’ and what’s more mysterious than listening to the words in a language you don’t understand, while clouding the altar in clouds of incense?
‘παρθένος’, by the way, is transliterated as ‘parthenos’
Yet παρθένος had a different sort of resonance, didn’t it? It was an epithet of Athena and Artemis – not bashful innocent young girls before marriage, but fierce powerful adult women who were independent of men as opposed to not dependent on one yet.
Very odd, really, that the Greeks had gods like that.
These modern norms are what jay dismissively calls “political correctness” (a meaningless, sneering term that adds nothing to any discussion), and they include the notion that women are people.
You are not reading carefully. What I dismiss as political correctness is this desire to re-mod an old book of mythology to make it appear ‘modern’. That’s crap. It is what it is, and is not more suitable for updating than is Homer’s Ulysses or Shakespeare.
I object ot the whitewashing to make it politically acceptable.