The Voice

I'm currently test-driving a New Testament translation called The Voice. It's apparently a product of the 'emergent' movement. I'm frankly confused by the whole emergent thing. Where do these folk sit on the continuum between fundagelicism and sanity? Read Phyllis Tickle's The Great Emergence and you might be forgiven for thinking the latter, but I'm not so sure.

The Voice is published by Thomas Nelson, so that's minus 10 points before you even crack open the cover. Next, take the temperature with two key texts in that most incoherent of Pauline letters, Romans.

Romans 3:22 (along with texts like Galatians 2:16) can be translated two ways, and there's a wide theological gulf between them. Before the beginning of the twentieth century the text was rendered "faith of Christ," as in the KJV (and before that Tyndale, the Geneva and Bishop's Bible.) The ratbags who produced the American Standard Version (1901) changed it to "faith in Christ," and it's been downhill ever since. "Faith in Christ" leads to sawdust trails and Chick tracts. Faith (or faithfulness) of Christ puts the emphasis back on Jesus and away from propositional righteousness. The Greek lends itself to of more than in, but oh dear, there goes a handy-dandy proof text.

The Voice does the right thing: "This redeeming justice comes through the faithfulness of Jesus..." Ten points.

Romans 16:7 is the Junia text which has already been mentioned here. Here The Voice gives poor Junia a gender reassignment, and she pops up as Junias (a totally unwarranted male name.) Minus ten points.

The Voice has a distinctive (one might even say 'cool') layout, and there's the promise of a full translation, that includes the Old Testament, somewhere downstream. The notes are designed to promote a devotional (yuck, ick, has anyone got mouthwash?) reading: minus twenty points. Scholars who contributed include Darrell Bock of Dallas Seminary (minus 50 points), but Brian McLaren's influence shouldn't be understated (plus 10 points), and Phyllis Tickle is involved in the Old Testament part of the project (plus 5 points.)

What The Voice does with the sense of Romans as a whole I'm about to discover. Not that I'm sure Romans is capable of making good sense given Paul's overindulgence in complex rhetoric. Let's face it, if Barth stuffed up so badly, what chance have a bunch of middle-class emergents got? If Luther only succeeded in muddying the waters, isn't it likely that Bock will produce pure schlock?

I'll get back on that one...

If anyone is interested in the pros and cons of Romans 3:22, and is prepared to deal with some fairly technical exegesis around Pistis Christou, Bird and Sprinkle's The Faith of Jesus Christ will tell you far more than you need to know.

The Mistaken Virgin

It's a big year for Bible aficionados, and here's the opening salvo. The American Catholic translation, the New American Bible, has been tweaked. Originally issued in 1970, the New Testament was revised in 1986 and the Psalms in 1991. Now it's the Old Testament - including Psalms - that gets a thorough going over. Outdated terms have been replaced with ones commonly in use ('holocaust' becomes 'burnt offering,' 'booty' becomes 'plunder'), and some inaccurate translation choices have been improved. This revised edition of the NAB will be referred to as the NABRE.

Nothing exciting there, you say? Not so. There's a tempest blowing because, with great integrity, the translators have changed Isaiah 7:14 to read "young woman" (Hebrew: almah) rather than "virgin." Back in January there was a rant on this very issue right here. It's encouraging to see the NABRE join with that other great Catholic translation, the New Jerusalem Bible, in putting accuracy above dogma.

But you don't mess with tradition without cost. A woman on Facebook protests "no, you don't change the Bible." I'd have thought that was the whole point, not to change almah (young woman) to virgin. While Jim West in generous in his praise of the NABRE, what do we make of the logic employed by Baptist pastor Peter Copeland? Pete seems to be concerned that the hoi polloi will forget that Isaiah 7 is a prophecy of Christ (which of course, it originally wasn't!) It's an interesting turn-about; a Baptist arguing that church tradition should trump the biblical text, while the Catholic bishops favour fidelity to scripture over tradition.

I guess even the Catholic bishops can't win them all...

Litmus texts - The Apostle Junia

There is a curious text in Romans 16 (verse 7) that names a woman, Junia, among the apostles. It inspired Rena Pederson to write The Lost Apostle: Searching for the Truth About Junia. Unfortunately it seems to be out of print, but is still available in a Kindle edition. It's a good, sound, non-academic read. Bottom line: the text indicates that Junia (indisputably a woman's name) was, along with a bloke named Andronicus, "prominent among the apostles."

This of course is a problem for many of our more conservative brethren who wouldn't dream of ordaining a mere woman to the lowliest office of ministry, let alone as an apostle. Obviously there's been a mistake. Junia has accordingly been downgraded to a male by translations like the New Jerusalem Bible and the NIV, which re-brand her as "Junias", a male moniker. This is a textually dodgy move, so the evil English Standard Version (along with the NET Bible) performs surgery on the text to put the little lady in her rightful place. Now Junia keeps her gender but is merely "well known to the apostles."

Suzanne McCarthy has some interesting comments on the Junia passage on her blog, particularly on the attempt to suggest that the guys who were blessed with apostolic status were simply on first name basis with the good woman, presumably as she was serving them tea and cookies after all the important stuff was over. She concludes:

There is no chance that the apostles were only those to whom Andronicus and Junia were well-known, because there is no word which is parallel to "well-known" in the Greek. Ah well.

Romans 16:7 is a great "litmus text" to indicate whether the translation you're using is worth the paper it's printed on.

The Unexpected Virgin

Can somebody please explain the possible justification for translating Isaiah 7:14 as "Behold, the virgin shall conceive..." (ESV) when the Hebrew says no such thing?

Matthew in his gospel (1:22-23) translates it that way when citing the verse, but Matthew is either taking liberties with the Greek Septuagint (parthenos), being extremely creative with his messianic proof texting, or both. The Hebrew word, as all biblical students should know, is almah, meaning young woman, corresponding to alem, young man. If 'virgin' had been intended, there was a perfectly good word available, betulah. Isaiah doesn't use it.

Then there's the context of Isaiah 7. A prophecy? Well yes, but a very short term one. Reading on from v.14 through to v.17 the context makes it crystal clear that there's nothing here about a coming messiah. Interpretation of scripture in the first century was apparently a seat of the pants affair which most of us would scarcely recognise, whether for the early Christians or the sectarians of Qumran, so we can probably cut them some slack. But what excuse do the latter-day translators of the English Standard Version and the New International Version have?

Even the Catholic New Jerusalem Bible reads "young woman."

Digression: So does the NRSV, Revised English Bible, Good News Bible, New English Bible, Inclusive Bible, Moffatt, JPS. The Jerusalem Bible reads 'maiden.' Virgin is retained in the NAB, NASB, NLT, TNIV, CEV and Christian Community Bible.

The passage in Matthew is legitimately rendered as 'virgin,' but any modern translation that reverts to 'virgin' in Isaiah is deliberately playing fast and loose with the Hebrew text. The ESV doesn't appear to translate almah at all, it just provides a face-saving apologetic substitution. Why pick on the ESV? Well, it's a particularly blatant example. The ESV is a revision of the 1952 Revised Standard Version, presumably updating and improving that text. Yet the RSV also reads "young woman."

It seems to be another example of "direct rectilinear messianic prophecy", cleaning up the older texts so the newer texts seem more accurate. If Isaiah won't say what we need him to say, why we'll change what he says, then stick out our chins and claim we're providing a more faithful translation!

It's comforting to find that there are committed Christian scholars who are willing to blow the whistle on this sleight of hand. Mention of Thom Stark's The Human Faces of God is relevant here. He calls this kind of thing "a conspicuous hermeneutic of convenience." Some time next week, all going well, there'll be a short review posted here, but for now the bottom line is, you really shouldn't have to perform a DIY lobotomy to be a good Christian (at least a non-fundamentalist Christian.)

But if you claim to provide an accurate translation, surely you do have to actually translate accurately.

"So Amazing a Blasphemy"

It's an unremarkable verse in most English translations. Here's Jeremiah 20:7 in the ESV.

O LORD, you have enticed me,
and I was enticed:
you have overpowered me,
and you have prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all day long;
everyone mocks me.

Pretty innocuous and quite suitable for pious reading aloud in a family devotion. James Crenshaw in his book A Whirlpool of Torment, however, offers these eye-opening comments on that verse.

"In the quotation from Jer. 20:7 above, Jeremiah accuses God of rape. This is no trivial accusation, nor is it uttered in a flippant manner. The words are carefully chosen to cover the act of seduction and accompanying violence."

Elsewhere, Crenshaw provides the following translation of the first part of v.7:

You have seduced me, YHWH, and I have been raped;
You have seized me and prevailed.

It's a disturbing image, and although I'd been aware of it for some time, it was brought back to me again reading, of all things, Mary Doria Russell's sci-fi novel Children of God, where the leading character mulls over God's "silent, brutal indifference."

"You seduced me, Lord, and I let You," he read in Jeremiah, weeping... "You raped me, and I have become the object of derision."

We like to claim many comforting images of God: father, lover, friend, law-giver, creator, sustainer, provider, to name but a few. But homosexual rapist? Shades of Father Zeus and hapless Ganymede?

Harold Bloom, in Ruin the Sacred Truths, offers a similar translation to Crenshaw's, then adds:

"This is so extraordinary a trope, and so amazing a blasphemy, that I wonder always why there is not more than perfunctory commentary upon it."

The domesticated God and the domesticated Bible are a comfortable illusion. Occasionally - but only very occasionally - the wild nature of both escapes the ecclesiastical cage and leaves us slack-jawed.