Dangerous Territory

I remember a comedian several years ago, doing a bit about about the "new" (this was the 80's) shops that were offering glasses that are ready in one hour. "I'm sorry," he said "but some things should take a couple of days. Like I want some guy staring at the clock rushing to finish my specs in 59 minutes and 59 seconds and rushing up to the counter and saying 'Here!" You have to see it to grasp the true humor.

The point is of course for something as important as seeing, you want experts who take their time, know what they are doing, and make sure that they get it right. Now I learn about a group at conservapedia.com, a conservative site fashioned after Wikipedia, that is working on their own translation of the Bible "without corruption of liberal bias." This will be an online effort which can be edited by any person who logs on to their site, much like Wikipedia does for other information.

Now I say this realizing that I approach the Bible with my own bias as we all do when we read it. Some things we like, some we wrestle with, and others, we just don't understand anymore because of our context. My reading of scripture is always through the lenses of a 21st century white male in the United States, from a mainline protestant tradition. I own that.

All that being said I find this project appalling. No matter whether we are liberals, conservatives, or anything in between, conforming the Bible to say what we want it to say for our own political agenda is outrageous. Bible translations throughout the centuries have, with some exceptions, been about capturing the meaning of the original manuscripts while preserving that meaning as they are translated into our modern language. In that approach, we acknowledge that we always lose something in translation. However, the approach is always from a theological,scholarly perspective to capture it's meaning. Not from promoting one political ideology.

For example the site says they will seek to "identify terms that have lost their original meaning, such as "word" in the beginning of the Gospel of John, and suggest replacements, such as "truth." Actually it is "word" and it has not lost it's meaning, but is rooted in the story of creation from Genesis 1 where God speaks the world into existence as we now know it. It has nothing to do with what is true and what is not, but about the nature, existence, and being, of Christ himself.

There are other examples of removing such socialist terms as "laborer" and replacing them with "volunteer." Well that has two problems. One is that when the word is mentioned, they are talking about paid or slave labor, not volunteers. Second is that Jesus did not ask for volunteers to follow him, he asked for disciples.

I could go on. Now again we all have our biases. I am no different. However, when we seek to manipulate our sacred scriptures to fit into our own narrative, rather than conforming our lives to the narrative that scriptures as translated, have been to us by God. We have major problems.