?Conservapedia.com launched the Conservative Bible Project in 2009 to strip the King James Version of its liberal and progressive passages. A right-wing whack job version could be coming to a church near you soon.
Here’s a new one…well, kind of new. It seems one right-winger believes the Bible’s King James Version is too liberal. Conservapedia.com founder Andy Schafly?son of ultraconservative activist Phyllis Schafly?has begun translating overly progressive passages.
The site’s Conservative Bible Project completed translating its first draft of a new and less liberal New Testament in April 2010. Biblical scholars and theologians aren’t reworking of the Word of God though. Schafly described the project’s intent:
[It] is a project utilizing the “best of the public” to render God’s word into modern without liberal translation distortions.
Schafly’s depending on average Joes and Josephines?to get the ecclesiastical job done. Phyllis coined the phrase during a 2009 Conservapedia.com interview. (Who knows how he snagged that big get.) A site entry provides a definition:
The “best of the public” is a successful approach to education, scholarship, and biblical translation.
Enlisting ?non-traditional? translators means less than traditional approach is required. People, who struggled through first-year Spanish, may not know Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. Knowledge of the latter languages is essential, when working from ?original? Biblical documents, according to ethicsdaily.com.
CBP relies on a version of the Bible released in 1611, named the King James Bible after King James I of England. Other versions of the Bible go back to the ancient documents, the “original” books, written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.
Ethicsdaily.com also decried the lack of peer-reviewed commentary, which usually accompanies translations performed by actual Biblical scholars, and Schafly’s more than obvious conservative agenda.
The project’s revisions of the KJV Bible include transforming parables into scenarios about the free-market system, according to the Huffington Post. And, it also stresses being more concise. Instead of referring to God as Jehovah, Lord God or Yahweh, He should just be called Lord.
Even a conservative took offense to the project’s mission. BeliefNet’s CrunchyCon, Rod Dreher, had this to say:
These right-wing ideologues know better than the early church councils that canonized Scripture?…It’s like what you’d get if you crossed the Jesus Seminar with the College Republican chapter at a rural institution of Bible learnin.’
Edited/Published by: SB
