In Discordance With the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible

by Peter J. Thuesen

The story of the translation of the Bible in America begins with the King James Version. In fact, many Americans thought of the KJV as the foundational text of the Republic, rather than a cultural inheritance from Anglican Britain. In the nineteenth century, however, as new editions of the
Greek New Testament appeared, scholars increasingly recognized significant errors and inconsistencies in the KJV. This soon 1ed to the Bible revision movement, whose goal was the uniting of all English-speaking Protestants behind one new, improved version of the Bible. Ironically, as Peter Thuesen
shows in this fascinating history, the revision movement in fact resulted in a vast proliferation of English scripture editions and an enduring polarization of American Christians over versions of Holy Writ. The recurrent controversies over Bible translations, he argues, tell us less about the
linguistic issues dividing conservatives and liberals than about the theological assumptions they have long held in common.

Genres: History, Religion, Church History

238 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1999

Reviews

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles Over Translating the Bible" is an excellent study on the role of Scripture and Bible translation in the USA. Peter J. Thuesen begins by examining the role of biblicism in the Reformation (arguing that Martin Luther was less of a biblicist than the likes of Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer and John Calvin) and the work of William Tyndale. Along the way he notes how perspectives regarding biblical interpretation, including how to understand biblical history, had changed by the time the RV was produced in the late nineteenth century. I have barely read out of the RV and it has since been surpassed by the RSV or the NRSV so it was remarkable to me to read how much anticipation greeted the RV's initial publication. Thuesen notes that the RV was not without controversy, as many objected to the inclusion of a Unitarian on the translation committee.

But it is the RSV that takes up the majority of attention in this book. Thuesen does an excellent job of relying on the testimony and correspondence of the RSV translation committee members, particularly its head, Luther A. Weigle. The aims of the RSV were to create an ecumenical Bible that was translated more accurately than the KJV. They would eventually succeed in having the RSV accepted by Roman Catholics (when you think about it, a remarkable feat, although it did depend upon certain revisions requested by Catholics, such as changing "brothers" to "brethren" in order to maintain Mary's perpetual virginity). However, though embraced by the mainline and many moderate evangelicals (numerous celebrations and gatherings were held on the RSV's release date), including scholars associated with Fuller, many fundamentalist and conservative Christians would resoundingly reject the new translation and cling to the KJV. In an ironic precursor to Terry Jones' burning of a Quran, some fundamentalists such as Luther Hux and radio host Bill Denton actually burned either the page containing the RSV's translation of Is. 7:14 (which controversially revised the KJV's "virgin" to "young woman") or the entire RSV itself. Though conservative Christians reacted harshly against the RSV, many evangelicals were also realizing the need for a new translation more palpable to the modern tongue than the KJV's archaic diction. The Christian Reformed Church played a large role in pushing for the NIV translation (which is interesting to me because the joke these days is that the ESV is the "Elect Standard Version"). Thuesen thus ends the book by explaining how the NIV served as a conservative answer to the RSV by maintaining a more "evangelical" translation of the text (e.g. Is. 7:14 features "virgin").

With so many Bible translations out there today, it is easy to forget how the vast majority of Christians throughout history have not had such a wide range of options when it comes to versions of the Bible. While the KJV is widely recognized today as being a poor translation based upon the ancient manuscripts we have now, it has left an indelible mark on Christianity and culture. The most ironic thing that stood out to me as I read "In Discordance with the Scriptures" is that while the Reformer's anthem was "ad fontes!" (back to the sources!), many Protestants were loath to let those ancient sources inform the translation of the Bible if it threatened their cherished KJV.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very thoroughly researched, insightful, and accessible review of the factors, forces, and philosophies guiding Protestant Bible translation, and perhaps more importantly the reception of translated Bibles by the public, in the US from the Revised Version of 1881 through the NIV of 1978. An important book for the serious student of the history of English language Bible translation, whether scholar or general reader.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A VERY INFORMATIVE SURVEY OF VARIOUS ‘MODERN’ (i.e. since 1870) TRANSLATIONS, AND CONTROVERSIES OVER THEM

Peter Thuesen teaches Religious Studies at Indiana University; he previously taught American Religious History at Yale University Divinity School. He is also co-editor of ‘Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation.’

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1999 book, “In this study, I shall consider the theological implications of Bible translation controversies in modern American Protestantism. ‘Modern,’ for my purpose, denotes … the period since 1870, when work began in England and the United States on the first major revision of the King James Bible, the Revised Version (1881-1885). Although the Revised Version generated … not a little opposition, starker conflicts erupted over its primary American successor, the RSV [Revised Standard Version], during the years 1946-65. [Particularly over the RSV’s translation of ‘young woman’ in Isaiah 7:14.]… Throughout the period in question, Bible controversies were less about actual translation than about the peculiarly modern modes of authority and interpretation that had developed since the 16th century. Indeed… the terms ‘modern’ and … ‘premodern’ remain indispensable for understanding the place of the Bible in Protestant culture.” (Pg. 4-5)

He continues, “Bible translation controversies between conservative and liberal Protestants stemmed first of all from modern assumptions that, ironically, both groups held in common… conservatives and liberals betray themselves as equal heirs of a critical epistemology that subjected every text to the test of historical reference. It was precisely their epistemological agreement that … prompted them to reconsider Protestantism’s centuries-old iconoclastic rejection of ecclesiastical authority. The bitter … controversies of the 19th and 20th centuries highlighted the need for some extrabiblical authority to certify the orthodoxy (whether liberal or conservative) of Bible translations. For liberals, the primary authority was the National Council of Churches; for conservatives, the National Association of Evangelicals… The stamp of approval of either the NCC or NAE assured Protestant laypeople that a Bible translation would not transgress their preconceptions of biblical history… a significant segment of American Protestantism tacitly repudiated the Reformation axiom of ‘Book over Church’ and rehabilitated a premodern model of religious authority.” (Pg. 11)

He adds, “This work is a cultural and intellectual history of the RSV translation lineage and its discontents. In tracing this particular trajectory of Bible revision since 1870, I do not mean to obscure the tremendous diversity of lesser known translations… the publishing marketplace was a Babel of ideologically diverse Bibles long before the RSV controversy. Baptists, Campbellites, Christian Scientists, Lutherans, Mormons, and Unitarians were just a few of the groups that boasted their translations, annotations, or even whole new canons of Scripture… In no period of American history did a single Bible version, such as the King James, enjoy a complete market monopoly, and this will surely remain the case.” (Pg. 14-15)

He notes in the first chapter, “Zwingli, Bucer, Calvin, and Bullinger … differed from Luther on the crucial matter of the biblical canon. Applying the principle of ‘sola scriptura’ more consistently, the Reformed tradition treated the Bible in its entirely as normative. Unlike Luther, who privileged … the Psalms, John, and Romans, Reformed exegetes, reinterpreted the humanist rallying cry ... 'to the sources’ as a mandate to immerse themselves in the sum total of Scripture. The Reformed theologians believed that it was not for humans to judge Scripture; rather, humans themselves must be judged by it. Reformed confessions of faith consequently stressed more than Lutheran statements the authority of the whole canon of Scripture.” (Pg. 20-21)

He reports, “[In] 20th century America, fundamentalism sought solid ground and found it in the idea of an ‘inerrant’ Bible… the doctrine of inerrancy had been explicated carefully in the late 19th century by traditionalist intellectuals at Princeton Theological Seminary, [Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield]… [They] challenged higher critics to locate alleged biblical discrepancies and errors in ‘the original autographs’; the fact that these first manuscripts had long since been lost seemed to erect an impenetrable wall around Scripture’s inerrancy. Yet the Princeton position on inerrancy was not as hostile to biblical scholarship as later fundamentalists assumed… Warfield… endorsed the enterprise of lower or textual criticism even while remaining staunchly opposed to higher criticism, which raised fundamental questions about the divine authorship of Scripture.” (Pg. 58)

He recounts, “Among Catholics, the 1930s and 1940s had brought a renaissance of biblical scholarship. The Catholic Biblical Association … played a key role in a 1941 revision of the Douay-Rheims-Challoner New Testament… the new edition remained wedded to the Vulgate but took account of the Greek in the footnotes. Two years later Pope Pius XII issued a major encyclical, ‘Divino Afflante Spiritus’ (1943), fully sanctioning the translation of vernacular Bibles from the original Greek and Hebrew. With this papal blessing, the scholars associated with the Confraternity project launched a new translation of the entire Bible.” (Pg. 80)

He explains, “A historically unprecedented first printing of nearly a million copies of the RSV preceded the long-awaited official publication … [in] 1952… [The publisher’s] advertising and the translators themselves pronounced the RSV a ‘new AUTHORIZED version.’… Yet it remained uncertain whether the majority of American Protestants … would accept a scripture succession promulgated by the mainline establishment. Already… conservatives were marshaling forces to do battle with the ecumenical Church and its Book.” (Pg. 90-91)

He says of the controversial translation of Isaiah 7:14, “to [the RSV translators] the rendering of the Hebrew ‘almah’ as ‘young woman’ rather than ‘virgin’ was simply a matter of linguistic honesty. The Hebrew language had a specific term for ‘virgin’ (‘betulah’), which appeared elsewhere in Scripture but not in Isaiah 7:14. When Matthew (1;23) cited Isaiah’s prediction… he was quoting the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of Hebrew Scripture, which rendered ‘almah’ as ‘parthenos’ (usually translated as ‘virgin’)… [This] nevertheless appeared to conservatives to be a denial of the virgin birth and raised the troubling question of the RSV’s trustworthiness on other fundamentals of the faith…. Isaiah 7:14 raised for the first time in American history widespread public doubt about the orthodoxy of a major church-sponsored translation… the RSV endured wave after wave of popular suspicion as American pondered the paradoxical possibility of UNHOLY Scripture.” (Pg. 96)

He reports, “the conservative Lockman Foundation… published the first installment of the New American Standard Bible (NASB), the product of 58 anonymous scholars who adopted as their model the ‘Rock of Biblical Honesty,’ the ASV. Like the ASV, the NASB rendered the Greek and Hebrew rather literally and indicated departures from the original with the all-important italics.” (Pg. 112)

He notes, “Yet conservatives who had never hesitated to oppose the RSV faced their own dilemma: Should they defend the King James Version as the only true Bible, or should they support some new translation by evangelicals? Many… such as David Otis Fuller clung tenaciously to the King James Bible and even defended its Greek basis, the 16th century ‘Textus Receptus,’ as virtually infallible… Fuller surveyed the destruction wreaked upon the Bible by modern textual criticism… Meanwhile many fundamentalists… recognized the scholarly and evangelistic advantages of modern translations and clamored for a viable alternative to the King James Bible and the RSV… it became clear that many conservative Protestants were experiencing a momentous change of mind… prominent conservatives were not joining their liberal counterparts in deeming necessary the ecclesiastical certification of Scripture.” (Pg. 118-119)

He states that “The preliminary phase of the NIV [New International Version] was supervised by Burton I. Goddard… former dean of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary… Goddard himself was … convinced of the need for a conservative Bible in contemporary idiom… Yet he and his colleagues felt that existing contemporary versions were too paraphrastic and informal. One such example was ‘Today’s English Version,’ first published in 1966 as 'Good News for Modern Man.' The following year… Kenneth Taylor produced the New Testament installment of the 'Living Bible', a colloquial paraphrase of the American Standard Version rather than a new translation from the original languages. Decades before, RSV translators like Edgar J. Goodspeed and J.M. Powis Smith had helped popularize the contemporary-language genre with their ‘American Translation’ (1931), but its orthodoxy, like the RSV’s, had come under conservative attack. The members of the Committee on Bible Translation therefore believed that the NIV would meet a genuine need for a translation that was contemporary in both language and scholarship yet also self-conscious in its treatment of Scripture as God’s inerrant Word.” (Pg. 137)

When the NIV was published, “Liberal veterans of the RSV controversy probably were not surprised to find the ‘virgin’ of Isaiah 7:14 restored … NIV executive secretary Kenneth L. Barker defended the restoration on the grounds that scholars had not ‘convincingly demonstrated’ that ‘almah’ did NOT mean ‘virgin.’ Other disputed passages from the RSV controversy also reappeared in their traditional form.” (Pg. 149)

He points out “the attempt, prompted by the women’s movement… to render the RSV’s language gender inclusive… eventually the committee decided that gender inclusiveness justified a complete overhaul of the RSV, which appeared in 1990 as the New Revised Standard Version… Many evangelicals were critical of liberal attempts to render Scripture more inclusive. When the NIV committee in 1997 announced plans to introduce in America an inclusive-language edition that had already been tested in Britain, prominent evangelical leaders including James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, cried foul… Zondervan … abandoned the plan. Yet conservatives’ purported concern for ‘value free’ translation in some cases barely concealed their own commitments to patriarchally encoded biblical language.” (Pg. 152-153)

This book is a very interesting and informative survey of these various controversies.

[Daniel Silliman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the definitive history of modern Bible translations. Must read, if you care about religion and contemporary American culture.

Two quibbles: 1. The book could be more readable. It's a bit heavy on the academic language, and goes pretty in depth into debates about translation. I would have preferred a more narrative approach.

2. Focusing on the question of translation, the book underplays the role of markets--I'd say dramatically. Bible publishing and Bible sales have been hugely important to this history, and they're given short shrift. The book doesn't really recognize how the debate about translation since WWII has been paired with another debate about accessibility and how these are twin struggles are happening simultaneously in universities and in bookstores, across the country.

The quibbles reflect my biases, as much as anything. This is an important book and well worth reading.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Given the title, I expected a larger scope. The book focuses more on the conservative backlash against the RV/ASV, and especially the RSV. I would have been interested to see more than the cursory consideration of the NIV. The biggest takeaway is Bible translation is inherently controversial, and oftentimes reactions against new translations can be blown out of proportion.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Other than an introductory chapter full up with academic jargon, this is an excellent book, which I highly recommend, if (and probably only if) your are interested in the history of Christianity in America. It raises some important issues for Protestants regarding the authority of Scripture, and particularly if, and if so, who, has the authority to declare a translation of the Bible to be authoritative and theologically correct (I.e., Imprimatur and nihil obstat!). If you are not inetested in these subjects, you will probably be lost and bored silly.