Feature
Our Babel of Bibles
Scripture, Translation & the Possibility of Spiritual Understanding
From the perspective of one who values freedom of choice, individualism, and the market, the proliferation of new translations and paraphrases of the Bible must seem, on the whole, a good thing. From a perspective that places a greater value on theological probity, spiritual understanding in the laity, and coherence in the witness of the Church, however, the plethora of English translations and the Babel-like confusion of tongues they create is arguably a calamity. While every new translation is evidently a “market opportunity” and may express in some way the particular slant or voice of individual denominations on certain doctrines, the dissonance and “white noise” of competing Bibles tends to confuse rather than clarify discussion across denominational boundaries. In fact, the “Babel effect” intensifies the confusion.
In addition to new translations, we now have a plethora of “niche” editions, like the “Revolve” magazine-format Bibles, aimed at pre-pubescent girls, whichincludes marginal tips on how to put on makeup and deal with two admiring boys at the same time, or The Veggie Tales Full Text NIV Bible, the NIV Faithgirlz Backpack Bible (in periwinkle blue with a green flower!), the NIV Bible for Busy Dads (or perhaps for dads who aren’t quite busy enough), the Holman CSB Sportsman’s Bible (in camouflage, natch). If you are tired of your mother’s old Bible, which printed the words of Jesus in red, you can choose a more trendy Green Bible, with all the eco-sensitive passages printed in green ink. If you are a feisty woman unfazed by possibly misdirected allusions, then maybe you would like the Woman Thou art Loosed edition of the NKJV. If perchance you should be a high-end of the TV-channel charismatic, there are “prophecy Bibles” coded in several colors to justify your eschatology of choice. If you are a devotee of the U.S. Constitution (the document, not the ship), Tolle Lege Press offers the 1599 Geneva Bible, Patriot’s Edition, complete with a frontispiece portrait of George Washington, a prayer by him, and facsimile reproductions of the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution of the United States of America (with the Amendments), and finally, a tract on Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior by George Washington.
All of these makeovers of Holy Scripture are—at least in part—market driven. It is clear that most of them make money, but it is much less clear that they serve to enrich, let alone unify, the Christian Church. Even less is it clear that they assist even the most forbearing reader in seeing in what sense the Scriptures are given as “one Word of God,” pointing to Christ and not to us, or, as St. Paul puts it to Timothy, “given by inspiration of God, and profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). Many of the niche editionsseem rather to be packaged in such a way as to justify, in some measure, current fashions and practices of the sub-groups to which they are directed. This makes them profitable for the publishers, but not so “profitable,” at least in the sense intended by the Apostle, for the Church.
Downward Spindrift
Of what underlying condition, we should ask, are these Christian market wares a symptom? Clearly, the cascade of “contemporary” biblical translations over the last six decades has a stronger whiff of mammon about it than the odor of sanctity. But not only that: in execution of the translations themselves, I would suggest, we see a symptom of an increasingly materialist rather than spiritual understanding of Scripture itself. Here, then, is one sign among many of the pervasive coloration of our secular age.
Some of the impetus in recent translation projectsis transparently political; a recent example is designed to accommodate the demands of Muslims that Jesus not be referred to as the “Son of God,”1 but political motives are evident in other, more radically bowdlerized Bibles that have appeared since the Reformation. Though Luther was unsuccessful in removing books such as James and the other Catholic epistles from the canon, his “frenemy” Henry VIII was undeterred from attempting an edited version of hisown: Henry published a Latin Bible that conveniently omitted such passages as the prophet Nathan’s exposé by parable of King David’s adultery.2 Thomas Jefferson famously produced a Bible which excluded elements from the Gospel accounts about Jesus, such as miracles and the casting out of demons, because they offended his deistical sensibilities. Jefferson could approve only a safer, more humanistic Jesus.3
In historical perspective, it is rather easy to see how selective editing of what all Christians regard as in some sense divinely authorized text can be done for the sake of redefining critical biblical concepts and, in the process, occluding the transcendent-to-immanent polarity of Scripture as the revealed Word of God. Succinctly, it is evident that many instances of what scholars might agree to identify as “bad” or “bowdlerized” translation are actually symptoms of a much more general, indeed systemic, modernist predisposition to elide both in Scripture and liturgy the vertical or transcendent axis. These efforts, even if they leave the canon intact, are a species of immanentizing, in the name of “humanizing,” biblical language, effectively making the reader the primary locus of meaning rather than Scripture itself.
Charles Taylor’s “Immanent Frame” certainly applies to this issue. I think Taylor is warranted in saying that postmoderns of all sorts tend to operate in a “discourse derived from Protestantism,” but also that this discourse is not less evident now in Catholic environments. Further, even in the language of biblical translation, both Protestant and Catholic, we may readily trace that contemporary secularist reflex which has tacitly assumed that, in Taylor’s phrase, “the human good is in its very essence sensual, earthly.”4
The spindrift of religious aspiration back downward to earth has actually been going on for some time: Hans Boersma pertinently reiterates Taylor’s observation when he says that “the Protestant Reformation was part of a shift that had been in the making for centuries, and of which the de-sacramentalizing of the cosmos was the most significant feature.”5 Yet the reach of this de-sacramentalizing impulse into the very language of the Church itself has recently accelerated; however counter-intuitively, much contemporary biblical translation is fully implicated in a more general and fundamental drift away from transcendence.
David Lyle Jeffrey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature and the Humanities at Baylor University and Resident Distinguished Professor of Baylor Institute for Studies in Religion.
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