King James is surely spinning somewhere.
Just when I thought Christian Fundamentalists couldn’t further propagate their extremist agendas, I learn there is a project underway to re-write the Bible in an attempt to eliminate its “liberal bias.” I never knew the Bible was conservative or liberal. How is it that after nearly four hundred years, the King James Version of the Bible is suddenly not written properly?
I first came across this information at HuffingtonPost.com. I thought, “Surely, this is just one of those articles whose headline is more interesting than the actual story.”
Not so.
Here’s some of what you’ll find on the home page of Conservapedia.com.
“Conservapedia is a clean and concise resource for those seeking the truth. We do not allow liberal bias to deceive and distort here.”
“No other encyclopedic resource on the internet is free of corruption by liberal untruths.”
Directly from the project’s webpage, The Conservative Bible Project, you see these lines:
Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations. There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning:
- lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
- lack of precision in modern language
- translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one
Here’s are samples of what this project wants to re-write.
Liberal Falsehood:
The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34:
Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.
Socialism:
Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible, without justification. This improperly encourages the “social justice” movement among Christians. For example, the conservative word “volunteer” is mentioned only once in the ESV, yet the socialistic word “comrade” is used three times, “laborer(s)” is used 13 times, “labored” 15 times, and “fellow” (as in “fellow worker”) is used 55 times.
Thank God there are level-headed religious conservatives.
Rod Dreher, of BeliefNet.org, certainly a conservative on both politics and religion says,”…the insane hubris of this really staggers the mind. These right-wing ideologues know better than the early church councils that canonized Scripture? They really think it’s wise to force the word of God to conform to a 21st-century American idea of what constitutes conservatism? These jokers don’t worship God. They worship ideology.” Here’s the rest of his post.
Mark Shea, a writer and devout Catholic, writes, “Right wing dementia marches on apace. Some of this has a grain of sense to it, as ideological madness always does. For instance, the dumb attempts to feminize Scripture are pernicious and need to stop. But seriously: the story of the woman taken in adultery is “liberal”? Free market as Sacred tradition? Liberal wordiness?” More from Mark here.
Assimilating scripture to fit an agenda will not feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and otherwise help the least among us, as Jesus taught us to do.
We would do well to adhere to His teachings, rather than re-write them.
Sincerely,
Rants and Observations by Michael Kontras 