MetaCatholic

ElShaddai Edwards asks a very useful question:

What would it take to create a Bible that was acceptable to liberals, conservatives, baptists, methodists, lutherans, evangelicals, twice-a-year church goers, traditionalists, fundamentalists, catholics (little “c”), Catholics, Orthodox and whatever other labels you want to apply to Christians as the body of Christ?

I think it’s fair to say that no translation has attained that status among English speaking Christians (the KJV managed it for the churches of the Reformation), although for a short time the RSV came close at least in England. (I have no idea what has happened in other languages.) It would seem to me also that there was a period when the Good News Bible (GNB / TEV) had a fairly wide-ranging acceptance across doctrinal barriers in the UK. (Other people had problems with its language.)

I’ll make some general observations here, in order, I think, of increasing difficulty 

1. Canon. Is there any possibility on reaching agreement about translating the deutero-canonical books? It would still be possible (and perhaps necessary) to publish different editions, without them, with them as Apocrypha, with them in the LXX positions etc., but it does seem to me that the translation committee would need to agree on the propriety of translating them as part of the same project, with an integrated approach to translation methods, and allowing, as much as possible in a translation for, say, echoes of Sirach to be heard in John, or Wisdom in Romans.
2. Language. Inclusive or gender-neutral language has become far more of an issue than it should be. Most recent translations have made their use, non-use or limited use of this one of their fundamental unique selling points. In doing so they have probably helped intensify the debate, and made it harder to find a solution. The loss of a generic “he” in English is at one level an indisputable fact of the language as it now is. At another level it is representative of a cultural change: as patriarchy recedes in the West (or is pushed back) it genuinely does distance our culture in one particular way from that of the authors of scripture. Equally, we cannot and should not pretend that the forms of pre-feminist Western patriarchy were remotely those of the Bible’s authors either. If we are genuinely translating into today’s English, I see no way of avoiding a maximal use of generic language for men and women where the generic is articulated or implied in the original language.
   At the same time, there is room for serious discussions about what the proper exceptions to this general principle should be. A exemplary case in point is the difficulty of the phrase “Son of Man.” While individually each translation choice can be justified, I’m unconvinced that the NRSV does its readers any favours by rendering it “O mortal” (Ezek 2:1), “a human being” (Dan 7:13) and ”the Son of Man” (Mk 2:10). There are some, of course, who would argue that the only bad translation is the apparently titular use of the phrase in Mark. But the point I want to make is that the translations of Ezekiel and Daniel make it even more of a titular phrase for the average reader of the NRSV than it would have been for the average reader of the KJV.
3. Text. Most difficult of all, I suggest would be the need for agreement on the principles of establishing the text to be translated, and how to handle significant variants (and indeed what counts as a “significant” variant). For the OT there has been more convergence in recent translations on the MT as a base text among English translations. I think, however, that the Orthodox continue with the LXX (and can mount a very good case for doing so). Do we need a parallel column OT?
   There are issues here for the NT also: to what extent do those who extol the NKJV, for example, do so out of love for the KJV, and to what extent out of attachment to the Textus Receptus? Again this might be a problem for Orthodox Christians: as far as I know, they also follow a Byzantine text type. Most (even “conservative”) English translations are committed to an eclectic text, and such a text would seem to be a sine qua non of a common translation. Is this an insuperable problem for a completely common text, or could it be handled with a careful footnote policy? This begins to look more like a study Bible than a pocket Bible.

I hope to return to this question in looking at some specific texts, but are there, in the meantime, other large general problem areas I’ve overlooked?