Conservative Bible Project aims to rewrite scripture to counter perceived liberal bias

[Igel]

18. Textual criticism.

The key sentence in the OP that sets off my spidey-sense is "appears in some form in almost every translation of the Bible." Most translations of the NT include everything that's not butt-obviously later. So I John 5 probably was added in the 1500s based on a "correction" of the Gk on the basis of the Latin, and yet if you polled Bible translations as of 1980 you'd probably still find that the passage was in the main body of the text in most translations. There was an explosion of boutique translations in the '90s that I didn't keep up with, so that's probably not true any longer. It may still be there, but plopped into the margin notes.

By saying "translations" and knowing that most people will gloss over that they ignore the mss traditions that are arguably much more important, even in conservative textual critical circles.

The bit that is in the OP is omitted from the so called "NU-Text". Neither the Nestle-Aland nor UBS have ever struck me as especially RW in outlook. They're the ones that have bracketed as inauthentic (or at least not attested in several prominent textual traditions or early texts) some bits that those on the left have taken pains to point as late additions. The rest of the article then proceeds to misplace the source of the original doubt as to authenticity and its extent.

I haven't seen the UBS 27th edition. These things don't typically change that much over time, but there have been some late mss discoveries and use of better tech to make sense of older ones. The edition I have, copyrighted 1927, is the 25th edition from 1963 and was printed in '75 by the UBS. (The "edition" of these things is a pain to keep track of, since the text often stayed the same while the textual apparatus was amended.)

Luke 24:34a is footnoted as questioned in the NU text serving as the basis of the NKJV translation I bought in 1983, so this "recent RW revisionism" is in part from at least 1982, 37 years old, and probably older than that. That text was likely the 25th ed USB NU text. Note that the Nestle text has a critical apparatus from hell. The NU text 1975 text has a pretty hefty list of authorities for that passage, but still there are a few old ones missing. How to evaluate that depends to some extent on the views you have of individual texts and what you know about scribal errors and textual transmission. Heard one minister simply dismiss the Alexandrian tradition's omission by pointing out that if you have a book that has a lot of errors, you have three choices: Destroy it, set it aside without use, or use it. The Alexandrian text itself, he implied, was too sacred to destroy and too error-ridden to use. (I studied historical Slavic; we had to know about scribal errors and such things. He simplified. Doesn't mean he's wrong. It means living with uncertainty.)

Now, the idea that this was a late addition added because later liberals wanted it in is just ahistorical gibberish. Unless by "later" we mean "late 2nd century". The M text includes that sentence, including the TR that many conservatives revere, but the M text is sort of squirrelly in that it rests on a mass of late copies of a few sources. What's new in what the OP describes is ditching any text that suddenly is found to not have the right level justification given the amount of desire felt to dispose of it.


What is ironic is that I've seen this movie before. The Jesus Seminar tended to want to chuck out anything with any whiff of inauthenticity that they didn't happen to like (with real no need for a consensus, to be honest, because that's just group oppression). Because they wanted just what Jesus said, without all the later additions by, um, conservatives. From the late 1st century or the 2nd century. They wound up with a very liberal, very liberation-theological Jesus. A number of denominations also tended to think of them as heretical Bible scholars, those who started teaching as believers and talked themselves out of their faith but decided they liked their sinecures. The running joke was that in the end the JS would eventually conclude, by a bare majority, that the one word we could be sure Jesus actually was more than likely to have said was "the." This is a humorous Jesus-Seminarish imitation, as they furiously storm the mid-1980s with the same kind of "If I don't like it, Jesus couldn't have said it" outlook.

Just looking at the "Conservative Bible Project," though (I think I heard a conservative preacher mock it maybe 5-8 years ago, and it's not like it's a hugely popular thing in all conservative religious circles; those who think this are avidly self-deluding), some is just push-back against the use of ahistorical language to update and modernize the language and text. This can be tricky in all kinds of dimensions--not only does it trample traditional translations and the texts that people are used to hearing in the form they're used to hearing it, but it also often reflects the translator's doctrinal views. That's often hard to avoid, but a good translator should feel more of a pull to be loyal to the text than to worry about making sure it suits secular norms in the interest of "relevance." Even worse is updating content that's perceived as retrograde. A first-century document should be a first-century document, not sound like it's just been put out by a HR firm in consultation with diversity researchers and HR specialists at prominent Ivy League schools trying to get ahead of current cultural and political trends.

There's a parallel-ish intentionally deviant tradition that some conservatives find offensive (and liberals ridicule) based on some views about dynamic equivalence evinced by Nida and which show up in the Mariner's Psalm aka Sailor's paraphrase of Ps 23, for instance:

The Lord is my pilot, I shall not drift.
He guides me across the dark waters.
He steers me through deep channels.
He keeps my log.
Yea, though I sail ‘mid the thunders
and tempest of life,
I shall dread no anger, for He is with me;
His love and His care, shelter me.
He prepares a quiet harbor before me.
He anoints the waves with oil
My ship rides calmly.
Surely sunlight and starlight
shall guide me on the voyage I take,
And I will rest in the heaven's port forever.

Similar kinds of discussion involve how to translate "bread and wine" to, say, Amazonian peoples who (at the time) had no exposure to bread, much less unleavened barley or wheat bread, and most certainly no exposure to grape products of any sort. But they did have exposure to similar kinds of things--should those be used at the risk of replacing symbols at the heart of most Xian liturgies but which require a lot of rewriting of various bits here and there. Or does one explain in footnotes the mysterious referents? Leaving them with just the intentionally mistranslated albeit relevant version is an error. But it was a problem, one intrinsic to dynamic equivalence: If your understanding of the text isn't right, the mistranslations are likely to be really, really bad.