One Valid Quote from OneNewsNow

I normally find nothing of any worth on either the American Family Association website or their news arm, OneNewsNow.com. Both sites are prime examples of fundamentalist Christian thought in America today, and I have little patience for them. I have to admit that I did find at least one statement of worth in their recent article “The battle for truth in Bible translation”.

The article is not so much a reaction to the recent Conservapedia Bible translation project as it is a recognition that the project exists. What struck me was the statement from Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University:

People have always done this with the Bible. Virtually everyone in a mainstream Protestant or Roman Catholic church in the United States is reading a doctored version of the Bible.

I agree with this statement almost totally. The only change I might suggest would be to lose the qualifier i.e. to say that everyone is reading a doctored version of the Bible.

The response by the anonymous OneNewsNow writer (they don’t give bylines) was a little confusing:

Jenkins is referring to the Revised Common Lectionary, a selection of biblical texts read in worship services that amounts to about a third of the full text.

The Revised Common Lectionary is not a translation of the Bible, or an attempt to revise the original text. Instead, it’s a means of organizing the Bible to fit a liturgical calendar. I’m not exactly sure what the relevance is to problems with Biblical translation, unless by the word “reading” in the first quote, Jenkins is implying that “mainstream Protestant or Roman Catholic church[es] in the United States” are only exposed to the parts of the Bible that are read in formal services. Otherwise, there’s no explanation for why the RCL could be considered a “translation” of the Bible.

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