Conservatives determined to free the Bible of liberal bias.
Remember the story in the Gospel of John where Pharisees and scribes bring the adulterous woman to Jesus for judgment, and he refuses to condemn her. Instead, he said, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” (NIV) Jesus then exhorted the woman to go and sin no more. Remember?
Well, sir, that story’s just a bunch of bleeding heart hooey. Never happened. A bunch of liberals made it up, and it wormed its way into the Good Book and perverted the message of Christ. You know, the real, true conservative message of Christ. The one about oodles and gobs of people being eternally tortured in a lake of fire. You know… all that good news!
So say the folks behind Conservapedia.com’s Conservative Bible Project. According to those good Christians, the entire Bible, at least all modern English translations of it, is replete with liberal bias. They attribute this liberal bias to a lack of precision in the original language (Greek, for the New Testament), lack of precision in modern language (English), and translation bias in converting the imprecise original language to the imprecise modern language.
No word yet on whether Spanish, French or Portuguese speaking Christians have been similarly duped. Who cares, anyway. They’re not Americans.
Certainly, you can see how all of that comes together to make the Bible, as most of us know it, just another piece of liberal propaganda. Now, c’mon… we can’t have that! Right?
I mean, after all, if we continue to allow people to fall for all this liberal crap, you know… all this peace and love, forgiveness and caring stuff, who knows what other perversions that’ll lead to? The next thing you know we’ll be giving away medical care to people who can’t pay for it, feeding hungry little Mexican kids whose folks jumped the border, and, and… and maybe even holding off on bombing the hell out of peasant villages and oxcarts.
Hey, and another thing, I’m getting a little sick of all that gender inclusiveness too. How about you? It’s a bunch of bull, and we need to get it out of the Bible!
Everybody down at the Stick In The Eye Missionary Christian Assembly of Nazareth and Saddle Blanket Ministries knows that Christ taught an eye for an eye, hellfire, damnation, good solid free market principles, hellfire, hatred of gay people, hatred of Hispanic people, hellfire, capitalism and damnation. In that order. So, by God, with the help of the Conservative Bible Project we’re gonna take our religion back!
How are we gonna do it? What’s the plan? It’s simple. We’re gonna follow the 10-point plan. You can read the whole thing here, but I’ll give the highlights:
- No more word-for-word Bible translations. Uh, Uh… from now on, all translation is gonna be strictly thought-for-thought. Forget the words, we know what the Lord meant, so we’re just gonna say that… you know, what the Lord meant.
- We’re gonna emphasize free market principles contained in several parables. Those things were central to Christ’s message, and if we don’t get back to them we’re gonna go wandering off into socialism or something. Jesus was a capitalist to the bone, with a capital “C.” So, no more of this socialist social gospel bunk. All that stuff’s coming out of there.
- Words like “word”, “peace” and “miracle” are politically charged code words that liberals snuck sneaked stuck into the Bible, so they’ve gotta come out. We’re gonna set up a prayer group, and we’re just gonna believe that God’s gonna tell Rick Warren what words he really meant… you know, so Rick can do the thought-for-thought translation for us. It’ll be televised, so tune in. Don’t miss it.
There’s more, but you get the idea. Oh, wait, wait, wait… there’s one more thing. While we’re at it, we’re taking out that “shall not covet” thing in the Ten Commandments and replacing it with the right to bear arms. Thought for thought, remember? How about them apples!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
To be fair, the story of “the woman taken in adultery” is considered a late addition to the gospel, even by “liberal” Bible scholars. Heck, I expect they were the first to say so. As for this Conservative Bible Project, I expect it will be, like Conservapedia itself, a forum for perpetual argument among the ideologues of different branches of rightist truthiness. Think about it: No one is going to hate the idea of a revised capitalist Bible more than those conservatives who believe that the English Bible revealed to King James I is the inerrant Word, protected by God’s Holy Spirit from all forms of corruption and deviation. So if the market-worshipping Right wants to pick a fight with the book-worshipping divine-right-of-kings Right (because one reason the 1611 Bible is sacred is because James was the last Authorized king of England, you see), then I say, more power to them. May the best idolaters win.
The notion that the story found at John 7:53 is a late addition to the text has, at times, been in vogue among some scholars. It is a bit of a stretch to say that most scholars so regard it. It is quite difficult to find a Catholic scholar who is of such mind. And, while quite a number of Protestant theologians in modern times have challenged the passage on a variety of grounds ranging from textual criticism to what they regard as stylistic variances, classicists who have taken up the question have all but universally spoken in support of the passage’s authenticity. St. Augustine explained the absence of the passage in some early manuscripts as a deliberate attempt to suppress the story lest some believe that Christ had approved of adultery. I do not find this explanation altogether unpersuasive.
Though the passage does not appear in the very oldest manuscripts, it does appear more often than not in early manuscripts. Though I do not claim equal expertise with many who have studied this matter, I do claim a level of proficiency in Greek sufficient to offer an opinion as to the stylistic characteristics of the passage relative to the remainder of John’s gospel.
Stylistically, there is much, even striking, similarity between John 7:53 and the rest of the gospel. There is nothing in the passage that persuasively speaks against its authenticity. It will take considerably more and better evidence than I have seen to persuade me that this passage is spurious.
Sounds like Augustine had a good case. I’m glad to learn all this, because that story has always impressed me, and I would rather consider it authentic.
Still think this Conservabible is likely to disappoint its creators.