Contributors

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Rewriting the Bible

Christmas always brings out the worst in conservatives and this story really drives that home (as well as explaining recent religious discussions in comments).

Don’t know Aramaic, Hebrew or ancient Greek? Not a problem. What they are looking for is not exactly egghead scholarship, but a knack for using words they've read in the Wall Street Journal. They have a list of promising candidates on their website— words like capitalism, work ethic, death penalty, anticompetitive, elitism, productivity, privatize, pro-life—all of which are conspicuously missing from those socialist-inspired Bibles we’ve been reading lately. 

In the several years since their translation project was inaugurated, all of the New Testament and several books of the Old have been thoroughly revised. But lots still remains to be done. If you've got a soft spot for Leviticus, the Book of Amos, Lamentations or Numbers, they are all still available for rewrite, so get cracking!

I wonder if our resident biblical scholar is helping them out. Sounds like this is right up his ally.

Take that story where the mob surrounds a woman accused of adultery and gets ready to stone her, but Jesus intervenes and says, “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone" (John 7:53-8:11). It might have been a later addition that wasn’t in the original Gospels, according to some right-thinking, or rather right-leaning scholars. So the editors have excised this bleeding-heart favorite from the Good Book, and they've also removed Jesus’ words on the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." “The simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing,” Schlafly points out, proving that, “Jesus might never had said it at all.”

Yep. Sounds just like him.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had never heard of that project, so I followed the links in that article to the description of this project. Funny how your article ignored the reaction of other conservatives to this project.

The Bible project has met with extensive criticism, including from fellow evangelistic Christian conservatives. Rod Dreher, a conservative editor and columnist, described the project as "insane hubris" and "crazy"; he further described the project as "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'". Ed Morrissey, another conservative Christian writer, wrote that bending the word of God to one's own ideology makes God subservient to an ideology, rather than the other way around. Joseph Farah, editor-in-chief of WorldNetDaily, stated: "I've seen some incredibly stupid and misguided initiatives by 'conservatives' in my day, but this one takes the cake" and "There's certainly nothing 'conservative' about rewriting the Bible". Creation Ministries International wrote "Forcing the Bible to conform to a certain political agenda, no matter if one happens to agree with that agenda, is a perversion of the Word of God and should therefore be opposed by Christians as much as ‘politically correct’ Bibles."

That was pretty much my reaction as well.

As for the story of the woman caught in adultery, it is not in the oldest, most reliable manuscripts. For example, Codex Sinaiticus is the oldest complete New Testament yet discovered. It was produced sometime in the mid-300's. That story is not in that copy, suggesting that it was added after that copy was made.

You don't have to take my word for it, you can see it for yourself. The site is excellent. Not only does it display a high-resolution photograph of the manuscript, it also displays the Greek in a modern font along with a translation, complete with verse numbers. If you click a Greek word, the word is highlighted on the manuscript image. (If you haven't moved it in its window. That bit is buggy in my browsers.) By doing that, you can see that verse 7:52 is immediately followed by verse 8:12 on the same line. It's just not there.

That's not to say that the story sounds inauthentic. It seems to be an incident that probably really happened. But since it apparently wasn't in what John originally wrote, it cannot be relied upon to draw sweeping conclusions.

Nikto said...

Your description of that passage is exactly why it makes little sense to dwell on every little nuance in the bible. It doesn't appear to have been written down until centuries after the events occurred. There were numerous copies that disagree with each other. Councils like that in Nicaea picked and chose which books to include in or exclude from the bible, which passages in those books to include or exclude. They made those decisions for political and social reasons as much as theological ones.

In this day and age most every passage is interpreted differently by one Christian sect or the other, again to suit their particular political or social agenda. The end result is that there is no way for any human alive today to claim to have any knowledge whatsoever what the true word of the lord can possibly be.

That means that the hundreds of Christian sects claiming to be the sole purveyors of the word of god are misled at best or lying at worst. All of them are guilty of the greatest hubris, thinking that they alone can possibly speak for god. If one sect happens to get everything right, how can we meager humans possibly decide which one that is?

If it's impossible for us to pick the one true sect of Christianity, what does that say about a god who condemns us to eternal damnation for failing to adhere to a set of rules that he has completely failed to lay out clearly and concisely? The federal government manages to publish a new set of tax forms every year; why can't the creator of the universe be bothered to send down a new set of stone tablets every century or so?

Any rational person must therefore come to one of two conclusions: either all religion is hogwash, or the exact details and rules are irrelevant. In either case, the only thing we can do is make a good-faith effort to be moral and ethical, and exercise humility.

Condemning others for failing to abide by your particular set of religious dictates is the height of arrogance. You can pick the bible apart all you want to justify your dogmas, but you have no authority to impose your beliefs on others. If someone tries to do that -- be they Osama bin Laden, Ayatollah Khamenei, Patriarch Kirill 1, David Koresh, Joe Smith, Pat Robertson, or Charles Taze Russell -- you know they're either trying to steal your money or gain political power.

Interestingly, Pope Francis has in recent days spoken with much less hubris than previous popes. Whether that will result in major changes in the Catholic Church remains to be seen, but it is a hopeful sign.

Mark Ward said...

Couldn't have said it better myself, Nikto!

Juris Imprudent said...

The federal government manages to publish a new set of tax forms every year; why can't the creator of the universe be bothered to send down a new set of stone tablets every century or so?

Theology and taxation all out of the twisted progressive imagination.

The horror.