Faith

Rewriting Religion

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Last Updated on December 4, 2019

What do you do when you decide that the Bible isn’t to your liking?

Simply rewrite it, of course.  (And you were going to say, “Find another religion,” weren’t you?)

Though it seems like it should be the kind of joke Jay Leno would tell for his ever-evaporating prime time audience, it’s absolutely serious.  A conservative group is preparing its own translation of the bible with the explicit purpose of removing “liberal” language from the translation that dates all the way back to King James.

Yeah, that’s King James as in, “the King James Version” of the holy book.  That’s where they place blame for the left-wing book that the right-wing seems to want to have everyone else believe that they believe.

Somewhere along the way, there was a definite liberal slant, they say, written into the translation process.  So to take care of this problem, The Conservative Bible Project is ready to act.  Some are only suggesting that the Bible be brought back closer to its “original language.”  But not all are willing to stop there and are springing into action with a ten-point plan.

Among the plans for this new “conservative” version of the bible, is the removal of all signs of “liberal bias,” whatever that means.  The story of Jesus Christ’s encounter with the adulteress has been specifically mentioned as a story that’s a candidate for removal.  For those who aren’t familiar with it, here’s what happened, as told in Chapter 8 of the Book of John:

“But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’

‘No one, sir,’ she said.
‘Then neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now and leave your life of sin.'”

Is there something particularly liberal in this story?  At first glance, it seems like Christ is a “go with the flow” kind of guy, who’s willing to ignore past transgressions, and that, therefore, there’s no accounting for one’s sin.

But if you look at the story again, you realize that it’s really about something very different:  Christ was being tested by a mob who wasn’t remotely interested in righting this woman’s wrong so much as testing him so that they would have evidence against him.  They weren’t sincere in living a Godly life.  It wasn’t about sin, or law, or anything but their own plot.  The adulteress, though guilty, was merely a pawn.

Christ steps up and gives them all a reality check when he tells them that those who haven’t sinned at all should be first to cast a stone, reminding them that in the grand scheme of things, they’re no better than she is.  While he shows mercy to the woman in sparing her the crowd’s judgment, his message to her is both stern and clear:  “Sin no more.”  He didn’t say, “As you were.”

That’s certainly not inconsistent with the Christ I follow.

The passage I quoted above, incidentally, comes from the New International Version, a translation I use often.  This group, it seems, is somewhat irritated with the many translations like this that they feel “dumb down” the Bible.  I think there’s a big difference between “dumbing down” something and making it easier to read.  To then remove passages of the Bible that depict the actions of Christ while simultaneously reverting to language that makes the story harder to follow seems inconsistent with me with the notion of trying to reach the masses with the story of Christ.

For it to make sense, you’d have to believe that the various translations of the Bible over the years, particularly those “contemporary language” versions, were specifically intended to change the meaning, rather than just to make the meaning more clear.

What it sounds like this group wants to do is to specifically change the meaning of the Bible most of us have read, and that ought to be a problem for believers everywhere.  Double standard, anyone?

I note with great amusement that one of the ten points of their plan is to create a clear expression of free-market parables.  They want to explain the numerous economic parables in the Bible with their full free-market meaning, as if the Bible’s true intent was a lesson in capitalism rather than a story of the life, death and resurrection of Christ.

I suspect that what we’re seeing is the realization that at least some of the ideas proposed recently, like universal health care and help for the poor, sound too much like what they’ve read in the New Testament.  Take Matthew 25: 35-46, in which Jesus gave his followers a world-changing challenge:

“‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Feeding the hungry?  Providing handouts to the needy?  Helping the sick?  Can’t have any of that! It’s so…un-American.  So it must be un-Biblical, too, even if Jesus himself said it.  So they blame the liberals, which now means that it wasn’t newspapers, or radio, or television that was the first form of media accused of having a liberal bias, but the translators of the Bible…who date back to 1611.

As conspiracy theories go, that’s got to be one of the longest-running ones in history.

the authorPatrick
Patrick is a Christian with more than 30 years experience in professional writing, producing and marketing. His professional background also includes social media, reporting for broadcast television and the web, directing, videography and photography. He enjoys getting to know people over coffee and spending time with his dog.

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