It smells fresh, anyway. In a certain rather earthy sense:

A radical translation of the New Testament released with the personal backing of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and aimed at the those disillusioned with institutional religion, has been met by the mainstream media with a focus on a small number of biblical passages that relate to sexual ethics.

The ONE translation aims at a “new, fresh and adventurous” translation of the early Christian scriptures. It is designed both for mature Christians and for those who have limited experience of traditional Christianity or “may have found it a barrier to an appreciation of Jesus”.

That’s good, because Jesus was pretty into making sure there were no barriers to accepting him.

I’m not going to gripe about the cutesy nicknames: “Rocky” for Peter, “Maggie” for Mary Magdalene, “Barry” for Barabbas. (Oh, except the last one is anti-semitic.) Low-grade dynamic-equivalencies-cum-paraphrases have been doing this for a while. It’s insulting and doesn’t help modern readers fuse cultural horizons with ancient writers¹, but whatever. We can still be friends.

The complete reinvention of meaning is another matter. This is linguistic madness, understandable only when considered as a coup perpetrated upon the Text by a mad junta bent on justifying their modernist metaphysics and postmodern sexual ethics. Attend:

1 Cor 7:8-9 is now “If you know you have strong needs, get yourself a partner. Better than being frustrated.” Yes, that’s pretty much the opposite of the original meaning, but I think we should be able to put a minus sign in front of any numbers we don’t want to be positive. Especially if negating them means we can attend more immediately to our sexual appetites. I mean, hey, why not?

Mark 1:10-11 becomes, “As he was climbing up the bank again, the sun shone through a gap in the clouds. At the same time a pigeon flew down and perched on him. Jesus took this as a sign that God’s spirit was with him. A voice from overhead was heard saying, ‘That’s my boy! You’re doing fine!’” The Spirit didn’t descend in the form of a dove, because that’s silly; Jesus just took this one pigeon as a sign that non-Trinitarian god (lowercase spirit, mind you) was present with him in some indistinct but otherwise comforting way.

Smell the freshness of the scholarship yet? Maybe one more good, hard sniff will do it. The crack biblical scholars at WorldNet Daily were able to point out the following:

In keeping with the times, translator Henson deftly translates “demon possession” as “mental illness” and “Son of Man,” the expression Jesus frequently used to describe himself, as “the Complete Person.” In addition, parables are rendered as “riddles,” baptize is to “dip” in water, salvation becomes “healing” or “completeness” and Heaven becomes “the world beyond time and space.”

Have a hard time pinning all that down phisophically? Think of a 19^th-cenutry Oprah, and you’re making progress. Let me go out on a limb and predict that this publication will be wildly successful among a numerically moribund group of nominal Christians, and will bear precisely zero spiritual fruit anywhere.

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¹Of course the possibility of this fusing will be deined by the authors and backers of this translation paraphrase, at least by those of them smart enough to understand their own fundamental theorems.

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• Posted by Tim on Saturday, June 26, 2004 at 4:34:35 pm PDT
• Category: Religion
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