Sunday, October 18: The A.D.D. Detective
WWJW
by Leigh Lundin
What do you do if your religious beliefs conflict with your Bible? Most Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims would say you get right with God, but if you’re Andrew Schlafly, you rewrite the Bible to suit your own notions.
Really. I’m serious. I couldn’t make this up.
I’ve tried not to write about this, but I can’t stop myself describing an assault on the greatest of Books. At least I’ll be in company with Harper’s, The New Republic, Time, and many other publications, not to mention talk radio, Christian, conservative, and other blogs. The word ‘hubris‘ appeared early and often. I”ve barely heard the word ‘blasphemy’, although Catholic blogger Elizabeth ‘The Anchoress’ Scalia says "This is where I get off the boat," along with a more colorful analogy.
In a family of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, one unspoken lesson I learned was to treat the religious texts of any faith with reverence and respect. It never seemed to dawn on anyone that if one’s beliefs didn’t match the Book (of one’s faith), someone should change the scripture rather than one’s world view or bother with introspection.
Schlafly, not a Biblical scholar, sidesteps tricky questions about the Nicene Council and claims the Bible was mistranslated in 1611 with a liberal bias and each succeeding version has become "more liberal". According to Schlafly, Jesus was not the forgiving "gentle" teacher of peace in Sunday school classes, but "harsh". Those are Schlafly’s words, not mine. His bible will not include Jesus’ last words, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do," which is liberal bunkum to Schlafly.
Schlafly has long been a proponent of his own brand of political correctness. He is an ardent supporter of ‘American’ (English), often denigrating British, Canadian, and especially Australian wording and spelling. Schlafly expressed doubts whether Jesus spoke Aramaic, saying that’s a question "open to debate", without indicating what language Jesus may have spoken. (I mean no disrespect to the man, but after reading some of Schlafly’s writings on many subjects, a niggling little part of my mind wonders if he intends to claim Christ spoke American.)
The KJV The KAV
Early this year, Schlafly launched a project to ‘retranslate’ the King James Version to omit "liberal bias" and reinvigorate the Bible with "conservative concepts". The evangelist Rev. Frank Schaeffer notes the noble word "conservative" has become twisted to mean angry "anti-American religious revolutionary". Not everyone agrees, of course.
Reports of progress are unclear. With the exception of a woman who spent a couple of months working on the Book of Esther in Greek, Schlafly’s followers avoid those pesky hard-to-read source documents in ancient unAmerican languages, but rework the KJV the way they think it should read.
Schlafly estimated it would take about a year to correctly retranslate the New Testament’s "liberal wording" in the many troublesome passages about feeding the poor and beating swords into plowshares. He also wants to expunge any doubt the Earth was created in six 24-hour periods no more than 6000 years ago.
Gallstones
Like others who’ve been down this road before, his fervent acolytes brook no naysayers. While I was trying to document this article, Schlafly’s followers deleted earnest but awkward comments by bloggers faster than this writer could capture them. Doctor Peter Lipson’s RationalWiki gives a few specific word examples. The Commandment "Thou shalt not kill" becomes "Don’t murder," thereby clearing the way for conservative Christian acceptance of war and capital punishment.
While I hesitate to cast the first stone, Schlafly says the Gospel of John story of the adulteress illustrates a non-Biblical "liberal" addition to the Bible, one of many he says "emasculates Jesus". Schlafly’s religious scholarship appears about as tenuous as my own, but I recall a few things from religion courses that don’t quite match his assessment.
Perils of Pauline
John Gaston, a former colleague, used to tell ironic stories from his church. In a discussion about ‘new’ versions of the Bible, John spoke of an ardent worshipper who avowed, "If the King James Version was good enough for Paul, it’s good enough for me."
I noticed a number of fundamentalist Christians more often quote Paul of Tarsus than Jesus or the disciples who actually knew Jesus. Saul might have stopped persecuting Christians, but he still seemed to bear a kind of meanness at odds with the Teacher.
Years later in historical literature, I repeatedly read that Paul appeared instrumental in a political struggle within the early Church, at odds with the Mother Church of Jerusalem and, according to the Dead Sea Scrolls and other documents, particularly adversarial toward James, the brother of Jesus. Several scholars write that this struggle between the followers of Paul and James accounts for the dismissive and even derogatory treatment of Jesus’ family in the first five books of the New Testament, an example of the victor rewriting the history books.
So in an odd way, Andrew Schlafly may have been right about politics influencing Biblical writings– but not the way he imagines.
Orlando is the bellybutton of the Bible belt, fostering such notables as Benny Hinn and Jim Bakker. Within walking distance of my house is a church that took over a movie complex, a radio station, and not much further is Benny Hinn’s old compound. We’ve all seen those little pocket churches in strip malls, but an established mainstream church on the north side of Orlando must have felt left out. They built a strip mall in front of their church, obscuring it from the road.
My friend Steve took a long look at it, shook his head, and said, “What would Jesus buy?”
When I first heard about this project I thought of Poe’s Law http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Poe's_Law
However, it looks like Mr. S is serious.
Mr. S. is hardly the only person to, uh, cast stones at the story of the woman taken in adultery. Most scholars seem to agree that it wasn’t part of the original text (although it is much older that 1600).
And by the way, while the Eisenman book you link to is terrific and I enjoyed it a lot, the carbon testing of the Dead Sea Scrolls make it pretty clear that his thesis is wrong: they were written before Jesus and Paul were born.
Fun piece. thanks.
My initial reaction was to dismiss Schlafly as an eccentric. More thought makes it seem that here is one more reason to be concerned about the Far Right. As recently as ten years ago I would not have believed that many of the things taking place since then could happen in this country.
I commend you for tackling such “touchy” subject matter. When one goes insearch of answers pretaining to the Bible and “scholars” warranting an excess of knowledge on the subject, I get the chills.
Very well written. I would expect nothing else from you, Leigh.
It gives cause to think, “What does the man upstairs have to say about all of this?”
I’m sure the answer is waiting for us…each one of us.
Good piece.
I think the man upstairs is laughing at all of us.
The far right this guy….the far left….God is a woman or God is “self”.
Trust me, if God were a woman things would’ve been far better along the way. 🙂
The thing is, one believes what one reads and thusly perceives.
Same as any short story of mystery, crime, passion, redemption and judgement and lastly, payment.
No one book is the answer. The answer is what an individual puts into their Bible or short story.
Thank God, God gave us humour and the ability to perceive because there are many to deceive.
Things used to rock my boat. However, life has taught me to let Mr. S. have his say. And all the other side detractors.
It only tests my faith, which is basically what we are talking here though it wasn’t mentioned perse, and makes me dig further into what I truly believe.
I am assuming that’s what happens with anyone who has a belief in what the Bible is saying or who wrote it or said it or deemed it.
I liked your article and it was well written. Now for those who distract the other way….I’ll be waiting for that one!
Fair play y’know.
(The devil made me write that!) 🙂
The Bible is a book “in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction,” (Peter,in II Pet. 3:16, speaking of Paul’s writings.) Mr. Schlafly appears to be another in a long line of such “wresters.” One truly Christian and conservative will have nothing to do with this latest assault.
Good article.
I agree with you, Larry (and alisa and Loretta and Dick, too.) Some things, if you can’t do right, you leave well enough alone.
Rob, thanks for the additional information on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Even the New Revised Standard Version, famous for its controversial gender-neutrality and soundly criticized for being politically liberal therefore, translates Exodus 20:13 as “You shall not murder” (Hebrew “rasah”) — Schlafly is hardly alone in that. That particular passage has been at the center of some debate for decades.
There is nothing new in Biblical translations being deliberately skewed to the views of the translators. The very act of translating the Bible into English was once seen as being heretical, and hence political — William Tyndale was executed for it in 1536. Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible was one of the Reformation’s main ideological weapons.
Bookstore shelves contain a large number of paraphrastic Bibles, viz., translations that are not literal, but intended as idiomatic, and of course the translations are made according to how the translators, generally Evangelicals, interpret what is actually written. Nothing new there, either.
What distinguishes Andrew Schlafly isn’t his agenda, but his complete lack of scholarship in a field where scholarship is de rigueur. But his goal is not a scholastic one, and I have absolutely no doubt that the public outrage over his project was very deliberately calculated.
Truth is, you can justify just about anything as God’s will with a Biblical passage, up to and including genocide. The thing that makes the King James Version of the Bible a great document is not that it contains the word of God — it is not the most scholarly of translations, nor the most spiritual, nor the most accurate. What makes it great is that it is one of the sublime masterpieces of English prose.
CB has its own resident Biblical scholar, Steve Steinbock, who will tell you that the true beauty of the Bible (or of the Tanakh, at least) only reveals itself in Hebrew.
The oldest complete Biblical physical text, by which I mean a Christian Bible with both Testaments, is entirely in Aramaic (a.k.a. Syriac) and dates from the 5th century. You can read about it here. There is a 1933 English translation of it by George M. Lamsa published by Harper & Row which makes very interesting reading.
I dont think any of us have mentioned another well=knwon author who rewrote the New Testament closer to his heart’s content. I refer to one Thomas Jefferson. Look up “Jefferson bible”
I’d forgotten all about Thos. Jefferson’s edited Bible, which a scant few years ago was a cause célèbre in the press. Thanks for bringing it up, Rob. Your comment is dead on the money, although I might observe that Jefferson’s Bible was for his personal use and not part of a public political agenda.
…it just hit me….Andrew Schlafly is the son of Phyllys Schlafly. Their organization Eagle Forum put out a book around late 2002 purporting to expose errors in public-school textbooks. Their book was so full of factual blunders it was quietly withdrawn. They didn’t even catch a gaffe in their radio ad where they asked why Liberal textbooks don’t talk about “President Andrew Johnson’s military service in the Revolutionary War.”
I’m ranting. I’ll shut up now.