MetaCatholic

Let me quickly get off my chest my detestation for something like the Study New Testament for Gay, Lesbian, Bi, and Transgender about which Peter Kirk comments here. That’s not homophobia: I have an equal detestation for the Men’s Devotional Bible, the Daily Study Bible for Women, the Maxwell Leadership Bible and many more. The idea of customised Bibles for target audiences just appals me, though I make a pedagogical exception for children’s Bibles. It seems to derogate from the universality of the one gospel.

Okay, maybe I’ve expressed myself with incautious hyperbole there. But even worse is my growing feeling that the ever-increasing plethora of translations is moving in the same direction. I had never heard of the Holman Christian Standard Bible, till Suzanne’s most recent Hen Scratches (wish she’d think of a better name for that!) pointed me in its direction.

Looking at it on the web, it seems to me to veer oddly between the colloquial and the cumbersome in its use of English. Suzanne complains about the way it happily translates ταῦτα παράθου πιστοῖς ἀνθρώποις (2 Tim 2:2) as “commit [these things] to faithful men” while it translates θέλω δὲ πάντας ἀνθρώπους εἶναι ὡς καὶ ἐμαυτόν (1 Cor 7:7) as “I wish that all people were just like me.”

The difference between the two is almost certainly because the Timothy quotation is about people teaching, the Corinthians quotation not (although they are somewhat erratic about whether to translate it men or people in non-teaching situations). And for these translators this is an issue:

Some people today ignore the Bible’s teachings on distinctive roles of men and women in family and church and have an agenda to eliminate those distinctions in every arena of life. These people have begun a program to engineer the removal of a perceived male bias in the English language. … The goal of the Holman CSB translators has not been to promote a cultural ideology but to faithfully translate the Bible.

So there you have it: this is a translation as targeted as any of the editions I started with: it is really the Holman Complementarian Standard Bible (which might be a little less arrogant than sticking that Christian in the name). Gay people come off just as badly as women: ἀρσενοκοῖται is translated homosexuals, despite the cultural gulf between ancient and modern conceptions of same-sex male activity. This is the opposite of the gay bible edition I excoriated to start with, and just as misplaced.

Such a quick glance as I have taken may be unfair, (for someone who like it, see here) but browsing, neither OT nor NT samples I examined made me feel I would seek it out again. More off-putting than the translation itself, however, was the website. I am not impressed by the bare, unqualified statement “The Bible is God’s revelation to man [sic].” Nor that, having made such a christologically questionable statement, they should go on to render the words of Jesus in red, which is surely a typographical denial of the inspiration of scripture.

I find their introductory “facts” about the Bible somewhat bizarre, to say nothing of questionable:

• The Bible was written by 40 different authors. And they were not all alike—certainly not just “men of the cloth.” There were politicians, shepherds, a medical doctor, military leaders, assorted tradesmen, and a theologian or two thrown in for good measure.
• “Their times” spanned nearly 16 centuries—from about 1500 B.C. to 95 A.D. After 1600 years in the making, it’s remained the same for even longer. The “canon” of Scripture was settled in the fourth century, and Christians have generally accepted our collection of 66 “little books” to be The Bible ever since.

We don’t know anyone who’s ever disputed any of those “facts”, do we now? It hardly predisposes me to place much trust in their awareness of the cultures embedded and expressed in the languages of the Bible.

Finally (and leaving aside my usual gripe (e.g. here) about no translation of the deutero-canonical books — hardly surprising in the light of second “fact” quoted above) the Dementor’s kiss is finally imparted when I see it is commended by, among others, Pat Robertson.