Thomas Jefferson disagreed with parts of the New Testament and considered them irrelevant (or too “supernatural”) to the core parts of the Christian faith. He famously published his own New Testament with sections edited out, entire books missing. It’s been called the Jefferson Bible.
History repeats itself with the advent of the Conservative Bible Project, an online effort to re-translate (or perhaps rewrite) the bible to better reflect their concept of conservative ideals. From the link (yes, this is serious):
As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:
- Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
- Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
- Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level
- Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
- Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
- Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
- Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
- Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
- Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
- Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”
Thus, a project has begun among members of Conservapedia to translate the Bible in accordance with these principles.
Read the rest of the entry, including the “examples” and try to not either cry/weep/laugh/or HULK SMASH. It is just insane. I cannot pretend to have a neutral position on this. As Rod Dreher says:
It’s like what you’d get if you crossed the Jesus Seminar with the College Republican chapter at a rural institution of Bible learnin’…These jokers don’t worship God. They worship ideology.
Truth. Even the Jesus Seminar or Red-Letter Christians don’t cut out parts of the bible…they merely elevate verses over others. Everybody does that, even the hardest of literalists. So this is a farce. There, I said it. It would be funny if it weren’t obviously an honest effort.
This is a bad.hack, one that negates the dissonance that every follower of Christ ought to experience and replacing it with a biblical echo-chamber that only sends back conservative rainbows in reply. It either will hurt Christianity by playing to people’s (especially, typically, conservatives’) need for certainty, or will expose the bible as neutered without the dissonance of thought and expression.
But don’t take my words for it…the author of a 2004 translation/compendium of the original Jefferson bible had this to say:
[Jefferson] decided that the rules of the club to which he wished to belong were not the rules he wanted to play by. So instead of changing clubs, he changed the rule book by literally cutting and pasting together only the sections that he found relevant to his interpretation.
In short, this has no more place in public discourse than the LOLcats Bible…except that one is HILarious. This Project is just scary dumb, written by people without any of the values of either Conservatives or Liberals, and hopefully in the annals of time it too will end up on the cutting-room floor.
Thoughts?
And the winner of snarkiest response is given to salon.com: LINK
I really liked that Salon article, as well as your post. This whole project is just appalling.
"Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story."
WTF?
Right. If anything, later passages or writings sought to do away with ambiguity or nuance the radical gospel message. But even in the reverse it's a ridiculous idea.
And they gambled for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he was added to the eleven apostles.
I first heard about the Conservapedia folks and their Bible re-write from an atheist friend. I remember telling him that no, it was an ironic joke like when Jonathan Swift wrote "A Modest Proposal". I've since then realized that these people are serious (just another reason for him to think I'm a "Christian dummie"!) It's just hard to believe that these guys are for real.
While I am by no means a fan of the politicization of the bible, this posting represents a profound misinterpretation of the objectives of the Conservative Bible. The Conservative Bible no more represents taking a pair of scissors to Holy Scripture than do any of the inclusive-language translations of recent years, such as the Today’s New International Version, and perhaps less so, depending on your perspective. What Thomas Jefferson did was to select certain passages from the Gospels that he felt contained the moral philosophy of Jesus Christ, and that philosophy alone, devoid of possible sources of confusion, such as the accounts of miracles; he created this project initially for the catechesis of the Indians, on the view that their reception of the Christian faith might be aided if they were asked only to believe in the teachings of Christ, and not in the miracles worked by Christ, which are from the subjective experience of our daily lives, impossible and astonishing. As it happens, this was not the case; the miraculous wonders of Christ have surely drawn more to the gospel than they have turned away. In any case, as time passed, Jefferson grew progressively more attached to the project; he profoundly loved the morality of Jesus, and viewed it as the definitive system of ethical philosophy. It appears he also had some religious appreciation of Christ, although most likely in the sense of some contemporary deists or Unitarians; Jefferson most likely viewed our Lord as the Son of God, or a Son of God, but not as God Incarnate. That notwithstanding, I would say that the Jefferson Bible represents a beautiful example of a Christian devotional project. I say that as someone who actually rather dislikes our third president, for other reasons; I have toured both the slave-trading castle of Elmina in Ghana, and the slave quarters at Monticello, and in light of this, one does rather wish that Jefferson devoted more energy to practicing the system of morality he valued so highly.
Do Christians have a right to ‘cut out’ the parts of a Bible they like? Certainly; it is entirely legitimate to selectively quote the Bible as a devotional exercise (which is honestly what Jefferson’s main motivation became), or for catechtical purposes, to stress a particular point, or to compose hymns, liturgies, or personal devotional texts. My mother used a selection of verses, quotations of Jesus Christ, to annotate a cookbook she composed for her local Methodist parish (I’m rather fond of the selection, and have arrayed it myself for my own devotional purposes, devoid of the recipes, which are rather good, if I may say so myself, but of no use to me, as I am a both dreadful cook and an devoted patron of the local restaurants). Another rather more prominent example of selective cutting and pasting of the Bible can be found in the Gospel Book used in many churches, especially the Eastern churches. The Gospel book contains a subset of the verses in the Gospel, arranged in order of the Lectionary, as opposed to in their natural order within the Gospels themselves. The book is lavishly decorated with icons, or in the case of the Assyrian Church of the East, bound in solid gold; it makes a beautiful sight to behold, and is customarily venerated by the congregation at the end of Syriac liturgies. A similiar book exists for the Epistles, and the Old Testament readings. Surely UM Jeremy would not suggest that creating specially bound selections of Biblical texts, arrayed according to the Lectionary, so that the reader does not have to go thumbing through the pages in the midst of the liturgy to find the right passage, constitutes a “bad hack.” In like manner, creating a subset of BIblical passages for personal use, which is what Jefferson did, is entirely legitimate.
What is not legitimate is failing to accept the Apostolic tradition regarding the meaning of those verses; it is in that manner that we cut the Bible to shreds, not literally, but theologically, by disregarding the historic interpretations and reinventing the Bible to mean whatever we want to mean, in some cases changing the words to accomplish that foul objective. Neither the proposed Conservative translation, nor the gender-neutral translations such as the most recent edition of the NIV, represent cutting away the Bible in the manner of Jefferson. Rather, they simply take preferred readings of the diverse array of texts, that reflect their preferred theological or sociopolitical viewpoint, and translate accordingly. The main difference is that, unlike most “inclusive language” translations, the Conservative Bible Project is honest about its ideology and its intentions. However, in both cases, while neither project is actually cutting away the text in the manner of Jefferson, they are arguably doing violence to the meaning of the text, or at least running the risk of such violence, by translating with an agenda, as opposed to translating in such a manner as to preserve the traditional interpretation of the Biblical texts as received from the Church Fathers.
I myself use a multitude of historical Bible translations for my study. A dreadful monoglot, I cannot read Koine Greek; I am struggling to learn Latin, and once I’ve mastered it, I’ll move on to Classical Aramaic and the Estrangelo script. However, in the interim, I’m forced to read the Bible in my native tongue; to avoid misinterpreting it on the basis of flawed translations, I find it best to rely on several. My three primary Bibles are a Murdock translation of the New Testament, from the West SYriac Peshitto, a King James Study Bible, and the Orthodox Study Bible. The latter features an original translation of the Septuagint, and uses the NKJV as the basis of its New Testament translation. When in doubt of the meaning of a New Testament text, I cross check between the KJV or NKJV, the Peshitto, the Vulgate-derived Douay Rheims, and a copy I have of the NIV, which, being based on the Minority Text, provides a textual counterweight for edge cases. The commentary between the KJV study Bible and the Orthodox Study Bible is a study in opposites; in like manner, the KJV relies on the Masoretic text, the OSB relies on the LXX.
Modern scholarship suggests a nuanced view of these translations is appropriate; the Jews may actually have taken a razor to the Old Testament, excising the Apocrypha and the Christological references in the Old Testament text, in the manner UMJeremy objects to, however, the extreme accuracy in textual transmission provided by the Masoretic text, in the form of the statistics compiled for each chapter, is invaluable. Additionally, the quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament at times suggest the Septuagint, but at other times, the Masoretic, and the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest that, like the New Testament itself, prior to the Masoretic text, the Tanakh consisted of a variety of different text types and traditions (including of course the divergent Samaritan version of the Torah, which notably differs from the Jewish Torah in including an eleventh commandment, an injunction against polygamy). To a large extent, it appears the Apostles quoted from a continuum of Tanakh sources, ranging from the Septuagint on one hand, to versions closer to the Masoretic text on the other, thus you cannot go wrong by having both.
In summary, it is of vital importance that we avoid doing any violence to the Holy Scripture; and the way to do this is not to refrain from excerpting selected verses for specific devotional, liturgical or educational purposes; God forbid. Rather, we must avoid rewriting the Bible to say what we want it to say, in our minds, or through the politicization of translations (which I maintain, Jefferson, for all his faults, is not guilty of). Bearing in mind the multitude of manuscript traditions, we must cross check our readings between multiple editions of the Bible, to verify that a verse means what we think it means. Most importantly, we must read the Patristic commentaries, to understand how the Church Fathers interpreted it. Lastly, we should study other commentaries as well; to understand divergent views of scholars later deemed heretical, or of more modern scholars well outside the Apostolic tradition, such as the extremely conservative Calvinist theologians who wrote the commentary of my King James Study Bible.
I have found the Orthodox, Apostolic tradition of Biblical commentary to be the only one that is internally self-consistent, but the way I discovered that was by comparing multiple translations taken from different manuscript traditions, and then the commentaries thereof. One can see the light most clearly when contrasted against the darkness, and that light clearly illuminates the Apostolic tradition of the Catholic church. For an intellectual Christian to take any other approach to the Bible, especially the dreadful approach of rewriting it, either in one’s head, or literally, to mean what one wants it to mean, rather than what it actually means, is to tear the Word of God to shreds.