by Harvey Cox
Having settled which Bible they believe and when, another query one might put to our self-described Bible-believing Christians is: Which translation do they believe? There are shelves of translations, even in English, and at points they vary widely on how to render particular verses.2
This explains why such a flurry arose among fundamentalists when the Revised Standard Version of the (Protestant) Bible first appeared in 1952. In the King James edition, dating from 1611, a familiar verse in the Old Testament reads, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isa. 7:14). In keeping with the common Christian approach to the Hebrew scriptures in those days (and in some quarters today as well), this text was often interpreted as an obvious prediction of the birth of Jesus Christ from the Virgin Mary. It is a favorite for Christmas season readings. But the scholars who prepared the new translation noticed that the Hebrew word in question (almah) actually means a young woman who has reached sexual maturity, but does not indicate whether she is a virgin or not. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) uses the word parthenos, which does mean “virgin.” The RSV translators, however, rightly wanted to use the original Hebrew version. But they noticed that when the word almah appears in the Hebrew scriptures, it always means “young woman,” so that was how they decided to translate it. They based their decision on linguistic grounds, not on theological proclivities.
But as soon as the “new Bible” rolled off the presses, outrage erupted among fundamentalists. They viewed the RSV as blasphemy. Some, noting it had been published in a red cover instead of in the usual black imitation leather (or white imitation leather for brides to carry at weddings), began to brand it the “red Bible.” Since the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was raging at the time, the hint that there was something both sinister and subversive about the new Bible was not subtle. This translation was part of a Communist plot.
The scholars who had made the translation were surprised by the fierce reaction. Perhaps somewhat ingenuously they thought they were merely applying their best philological insights to their work. They had translated the Hebrew word almah quite literally. But this quite literal translation threatened the theological preconceptions of the fundamentalists, who nevertheless vehemently insisted that they believed the Bible “literally.” They had no problem deciding which Bible they would believe, and it was not the red one.
Translation has stirred up both linguistic and theological issues since the early years of Christianity. In the third century Origen tackled it, assembling an edition of the Old Testament that set six different versions in parallel columns. A huge tome, it included the original Hebrew text, then a phonetic transcription of the Hebrew in Greek letters, similar to the English phonetic notes found today in some Conservative and Reformed synagogue prayer books. Next came a very literal translation of the same text in Greek, then another Greek translation in more idiomatic Greek. Next to that was the Septuagint and finally yet another translation into what was then “modern Greek.” The whole work is called the Hexapla (“Sixfold”). It required an immense expenditure of labor, but Origen placed the columns side by side so that readers could compare them. He wanted to demonstrate as clearly as possible how disparate the different translations of the same passage can be. Which of those six columns do our Bible believers to believe? The Hexapla was a monumental accomplishment, and it represents a formidable challenge to anyone who contends, as the fundamentalists still do, that the words and sentences of “the Bible” contain one self-evident meaning.
The disputes still go on. The young woman/virgin question is not the only one on which there continue to be serious disagreements about translating certain phrases. This is especially true in Hebrew books in which there are passages with words that do not appear anywhere else in the Bible, so comparing contexts to discern the meaning is not possible. Most of the last chapter of the book of Job, for example, stumps even the best Hebrew scholars, and this leads to wildly differing views of how the story ends. Does Job really repent and eat his previous rebellious words, or does he remain defiant to the end? Does God commend him for his fierce insistence on his innocence, or does God condemn him? No one knows for sure. There are numerous cases like this, and often what translators do is to make their best educated guesses. Sometimes they indicate a guess in a footnote, but sometimes they do not, thus leading readers to think they are reading “what the Bible says,” when that might not be the case at all. Plainly, as we pursue the question of what it means to “believe the Bible,” the plot constantly thickens.3
Sophisticated fundamentalists, of course, know Greek and Hebrew and are familiar with the translation problem. What Bible do they believe? Their usual answer is that they do not fully believe in any translation, but only in what the text says in the original Greek or Hebrew. But this means they believe it even when, as with the example of Job, they do not know for sure what it says, which seems a bit odd. They defend their position by explaining that, since they believe every word in all the biblical books (at least in the Protestant Bible) was literally inspired by God, they believe whatever it says “on faith.” But here “faith” is once again debased into accepting as true something for which you have no evidence. Thus to “believe the Bible” in this sense does not foster the biblical understanding of faith; instead, it is at best a diversion, and at worst a betrayal.
To push the controversy another step back, it is important to recognize that no one anywhere has the original manuscript of any of the biblical books. All we have are copies of copies. This includes even the oldest copies, like the ones found in the Dead Sea caves. In many cases the several copies of a given text differ from each other, sometimes quite markedly. The oldest manuscripts in existence of the Gospel of Mark, for example, have radically different endings. If you piled them all on one table, you would have a fascinating choice of how you think the gospel ends or perhaps how you think it should end. One manuscript has only Mary Magdalene and Mary “the mother of James” (not, interestingly, the mother of Jesus) coming to the tomb where the body of Jesus had been laid. Another version of the same gospel has Salome with them. One ends abruptly with the women who come to the tomb trembling with amazement, so afraid they are unable to say anything to anyone. Some scholars think that this ambiguous ending is just the way Mark wanted it, but others believe there was once additional material, which was subsequently lost. Yet another manuscript of the same Gospel of Mark has the women reporting to Peter and the other disciples. What is a translator to do when confronted with this embarrassment of manuscript riches?
The King James translators more or less ignored the problem. They simply pieced together how they thought the story should end. Three hundred and fifty years later, and more humbly perhaps, the scholars who translated the Revised Standard Version included them all, allowing readers to take their pick. Incidentally, in recounting the same story of the Resurrection, the Gospel of Matthew has only Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” at the tomb, while the Gospel of Luke includes a woman named “Joanna,” and the Gospel of John mentions only Mary Magdalene. These are significant discrepancies, and not on some marginal passage, but on one of the most significant texts in the New Testament, making it even harder to know just what “believing the Bible” might mean.
But the difficulties do not end there. In recent years the bullish Bible market has been flooded with a variety of new translations that try to render the text into modern street argot. One that has attracted its share of controversy is entitled Good as News, the work of a former Baptist minister named John Henson. According to one admirer: “The translation is pioneering in its accessibility, and changes the original Greek and Hebrew nomenclature into modern nicknames. St. Peter becomes ‘Rocky,’ Mary Magdalene becomes ‘Maggie,’ Aaron becomes ‘Ron,’ Andronicus becomes ‘Andy,’ and Barnabas becomes ‘Barry.’”
This neighborhood-pub approach to names might no
t turn fundamentalists off. After all, the disciples could well have used their Aramaic equivalents when chatting with each other in their fishing boats. But what Reverend Henson does with some of the passages in the letters of Paul, especially those touching on sexual ethics, will not pass unnoticed. For example, the seventeenth century King James Version renders 1 Corinthians 7:1–2:
Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: [It is] good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, [to avoid] fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.
This new street-talk version puts it this way:
Some of you think the best way to cope with sex is for men and women to keep right away from each other. That is more likely to lead to sexual offenses. My advice is for everyone to have a regular partner.
In the KJV, the well-known passage 1 Corinthians 7:8–9 reads:
I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.
The new translation gets right to the point:
If you know you have strong needs, get yourself a partner. Better than being frustrated.
It is hard to imagine that those who found “young woman” sacrilegious in the “red Bible” will readily accept this wording. But there are many people who will. Just after its publication, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, commended Good as News and said he hoped it would spread “in epidemic profusion through religious and irreligious alike.” But there will be many “Bible believers” who will indeed treat it more like a flu epidemic and do everything they can to vaccinate their people against it.4
But prophylactic measures against new adaptations, paraphrases, and up-to-date renderings of the Bible have little chance of success. In addition to Good as News, a “Bible magazine” called Revolve, aimed at “teenage girls,” has recently appeared. It takes the next obvious step toward penetrating popular culture: a comic-book format. The text of the New Testament, although printed on nearly every page, shares the space with pictures and snippets of advice meant to appeal to its intended audience. Its covers feature attractive and fashionably dressed girls, all smiling widely. It includes sections on beauty hints and dieting. It also carries a regular column on what boys think (“Guys Speak Out”) and what they like and don’t like about girls. It asks readers to pray for celebrities like Mel Gibson and Justin Timberlake.
Like the “Cosmopolitan girl,” the “Revolve girl” is called upon to have certain traits, of which the first one is that she does not initiate phone calls or text messages to boys. As one researcher discovered, however, the counsel and the pictures sometimes contradict each other. The sidebars advise the young women not to use cosmetics and to dress modestly in order to avoid tempting boys into sinful thoughts. But the pictures focus on young women with figures like models who are obviously wearing makeup, and the covers show more than a little cleavage. It is also significant that some conservative critics have chastised Revolve for playing down how sinful homosexuality is. But the magazine’s position on this issue merely reflects the more tolerant attitude nearly all younger people, including evangelicals, have on this issue, often in opposition to their parents.5
The Bible in all its multitudinous versions remains the number-one best-seller in the world, year after year. The market is just too inviting, and there are sure to be more such attempts to reach it. Already among many evangelicals and fundamentalists a translation called Good News for Modern Man, admittedly considerably less racy than Good as News, has gained enormous popularity. One publishing house recently listed twenty different versions of the Bible now in print and selling well. Another publisher offers a “Bible Translations Laminated Wall Chart” for the price of $13.95 to help understandably confused customers make a more informed choice.
All of these “Bibles,” however, contain only the books of the traditional “canon,” those that have at one point or another been approved for inclusion by church authorities. Usually this has meant Protestant approval, although a new translation of Maccabees, which as we have noted above is in the Catholic but not the Protestant canon, has appeared.6 But now, in addition to all these variants of the traditional scriptures, a growing array of “noncanonical” gospels has captured the public’s attention. By far the most popular is the Gospel of Thomas (discussed in Chapter 4). It is a fascinating text containing 114 alleged sayings of Jesus. Discovered only in 1946 in Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, the manuscript claims that its author is the well-known “doubting Thomas,” who is mentioned in all four canonical gospels. But since it is written in Coptic, most scholars have dated the Nag Hammadi find at around 140 CE, decades later than them. However, fragments of what appears to be the same text, but in Greek, had been discovered as early as 1897, also in Egypt, so the Nag Hammadi manuscript is now thought to be a copy of an original Greek text that is just as old as the other four gospels.7
In any case, the Gospel of Thomas can now be found in the Bible section of many bookstores, and its mystical allusions to a spirit within as well as its Zen-like flavor have made it a favorite of numerous, mainly unconventional Christians. Some years ago I spent a few days with a small group of young people in New Mexico whose only text was this gospel and who spent their time feeding and sheltering poor people and living as simply as possible. They also eschewed marriage, but encouraged sexual sharing among themselves. Apparently they took quite seriously the attributed to words Jesus found in Saying 22 of their favorite gospel:
Jesus said to them: When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one…then you will enter the kingdom.8
The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas and its unexpected popularity, not just as an ancient curiosity, but as an inspirational text (due in no small measure to the brilliant translation and commentary of Elaine Pagels), have opened the door to a deluge of such “apocryphal” gospels and letters. There are, for example, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Epistle of the Apostles, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Judas. The antiquity and “authenticity” (whatever that term means) of each of them is constantly disputed. But they serve the positive purpose of demonstrating that a wide variety of different versions of Christianity, not just one, flourished during those early centuries. The enormous interest in them today suggests that they offer an alternative spirituality that is attractive to many twenty-first-century people.
This is not something new. Ever since Thomas Jefferson (1743–1846) sat at his desk at Monticello, scissors in hand, and combed through his Bible snipping out all the verses he considered supernatural and therefore not in keeping with his deistic proclivities, people have tried to improve on the Good Book for reasons they all considered worthwhile. In 1895 activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and a committee of other women published The Woman’s Bible, an early attempt to correct its antifeminist elements. Quoting Paul’s familiar statement, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus,” Stanton’s version condemned the second account of creation in Genesis, because it subordinated women to men.
Today, in addition to the new “gospels” mentioned above, there is also a version of the Bible in circulation that is tilted to appeal to a New Age sensibility; another tries to compress excerpts from the scriptures of several religions into a kind of “world Bible.”9 Still another translation, in order to minimize offending Jews, softens the anti-Jewish rhetoric in the New Testament by judiciously substituting the word “Judeans” for “Jews.” All this makes it more difficult to know exactly what a “Bible believer” is, and there is no end in sight. It is time to come to terms with the stubborn fact that we have no single and indisputable book we can confidently call the Bible, which we can either believe or not believe. We have many of them, and now that they appear o
n film, online, and in comic-book form we are sure to have many, many more.
I do not think this is a deplorable development. The truth is we do not have the original manuscript of one single word of the Bible. All the Bibles we now have are copies, which are therefore prone to errors and insertions, or translations, which by their nature are also always interpretations that always bear the telltale marks of the eras in which they were done and the theological biases of those who did them. But I think this is vastly better than having, perhaps preserved under glass somewhere in a temperature-controlled room, the Bible. If we had such a document it might mislead people into thinking that believing it is what “faith” is about. This is, of course, exactly the view fundamentalists hold of “the Bible.” Now, however, since what we have is not the Bible, but interpretations, and interpretations of interpretations, we are forced to look beyond and through the texts to the people who wrote them and to the mystery they are pointing to. It should help us not to bite into the package instead of into what the package contains.
Does it ever trouble fundamentalists that their attitude toward the Bible, a relatively recent one in the history of Christianity, is exactly the same as that of most Muslims who believe the Qur’an was dictated word for word to Muhammad by Allah? I doubt it. But with Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus now down the street and around the corner in America, instead of across the ocean, the challenge, even for ordinary people, of understanding neighbors’ sacred texts is bound to become more pressing. I sometimes wonder if those who would like to get prayer and scripture reading back into public-school classrooms (which might, under certain conditions, be a good idea) would allow the scripture to be read from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita or the prayer to be the Muslim Shahada in classes in which there are students from those traditions, as there are in many American cities. The religious pluralism of our country today means that there are many different scriptures in play. In addition to the Bible there are also the Hindu Vedas, the Confucian Analects, and the Buddhist Tripitaka. How does the Bible as a moral guide compare to these other ancient, indeed scriptural, sources of ethical insight and spiritual wisdom?10 The question of how we respond to the variety of “scriptures” among us today is one example of the challenge of living faithfully among a variety of religions. But that is an issue I turn to in another chapter.