King James Version

A modern, urban pastor comes to terms with his backwoods mountain family roots

A modern, urban pastor comes to terms with his backwoods mountain family roots

Growing up in West Virginia, the Rev. Michael Clary always wondered about some of the archaic language his elders used, words like "yonder" and "reckon."

Then he learned that his grandfather -- a steel-mill worker and country preacher -- had memorized the classic King James Bible by listening to tapes during his long drives to the factory. He had a sixth-grade education and, if he couldn't spell something, he could still quote a verse that contained the word and then find it in his Bible.

All that scripture soaked in -- deep. Thus, "I reckon" wasn't just another way to say "probably." It was New Testament language, such as: "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us."

These Appalachian roots caused pangs of shame during graduate school, said Clary, who leads Christ the King Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in Cincinnati.

Soon after that, "I was pastoring a fast growing church in an urban environment, and a spirit of elitism had infected us," he wrote, in a Twitter stream that went viral. "The people we felt free to mock were conservative, uneducated, backwoods fundies. … They lacked the theological sophistication and cultural insight I had acquired while doing campus ministry and studying at seminary."

The bottom line: "I had moved on. I was better than them. I was more learned and cultured. I had 'seen the world' and they hadn't."

Clary said he wrote those "words with tears in my eyes." Reached by telephone, he explained that he was facing the kinds of church tensions that arise while defending traditional doctrines in a flock located a few blocks from the University of Cincinnati. It's hard to be "winsome" -- a buzz word today -- while trying to remain faithful in a bitterly divided culture.


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A religion, academic and business story: Is there a 'best' Bible to use and quote?

A religion, academic and business story: Is there a 'best' Bible to use and quote?

RACHAEL ASKS:

Is there a Bible that’s the most accurate?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Almost all the varied 20th and 21st Century English translations on sale are sufficiently accurate and can be relied upon, though debates will never end on some details.

The first and fundamental aspect of accuracy is experts’ shared consensus on the best available texts in the original languages of Hebrew and Greek that underlie all translations, based upon a far richer body of surviving manuscripts than we have for other ancient writings. Here’s a somewhat over-simplified rundown.

Hebrew versions of the Jewish Bible or Tanakh, which Christians call the Old Testament, employ Judaism’s authoritative Masoretic Text. The ancient Hebrew language did not use written vowels, so medieval scholars known as Masoretes added “vowel points,” markings that standardized oral traditions on the correct readings of the words. This led to the 9th Century Aleppo Codex, corroborated by the 11th Century Leningrad Codex and other rabbinical manuscripts.

These carefully preserved texts are virtually identical in wording, though with some variations in pointing, and provide the basis for Jewish and Christian Bibles. The 15th Century emergence of printed Bibles further standardized the Hebrew text. The 20th Century rediscovery of biblical books among the 2,000-year-old ”Dead Sea Scrolls” added certain variations that translators consider.

With the New Testament, thousands of Greek manuscripts and fragments from Christianity’s early centuries exist. Today’s translators work from a standard “eclectic” Greek version formulated from these by specialists in “textual criticism” who decide which variants are closest to the original writings. Technical note: “earliest” does not necessarily mean “best” manuscript.

The resulting shared resource for translations is the German Bible Society’s continually updated text with all important variations, most recently the 2017 “Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, 28th Edition, with Critical Apparatus.” Major translations undergo periodic tweaking based on this ongoing work. A prominent evangelical, the late Bruce Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary, was the American leader in this international project.

Modern English Bibles provide candid footnotes that alert readers to important textual variants, which rarely affect basic biblical doctrines.


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What is 'Fundamentalism'? Name 666 or so examples from recent news coverage ...

What is 'Fundamentalism'? Name 666 or so examples from recent news coverage ...

THE QUESTION:

What is “Fundamentalism?”

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

After the Presbyterian Church in America decided in June to depart from the National Association of Evangelicals, The Religion Guy wondered in print whether some “evangelicals” are becoming “fundamentalists.” That raises how to define these two similar and historically interrelated versions of conservative Protestantism.

Back in 2019, a New York Times Book Review item by a Harvard Divinity School teacher called Jehovah’s Witnesses “fundamentalists” several times. Well, Witnesses do share certain “fundamentalistic” traits with actual “fundamentalists,” but the label was mistaken because it ignored Witnesses’ beliefs.

If the Ivy League theological elite and such an influential newspaper don’t understand the definition, we have a problem.

Yes, “fundamentalist” can apply in a generic sense to any old group with a certain hard-core outlook. But in any religious context it should designate only a specific movement of orthodox Protestants, prominent especially in the United States. The religious F-word should be applied carefully because, as The Associated Press Stylebook correctly cautions, it has “to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations.”

So here is the Big Idea: The AP advises, “in general, do not use fundamentalist unless a group applies the word to itself.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is irritated when offshoots that perpetuate its founding prophet Joseph Smith Jr’s polygamy doctrine are called “Mormon fundamentalists,” and now seeks to abolish its own “Mormon” nickname. Scholars of Islam similarly reject the common “Muslim fundamentalist” label for terrorists and political extremists.

Back to Protestants.


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Modernized New Revised Standard Bible is surefire news, landing amid today's language wars

Modernized New Revised Standard Bible is surefire news, landing amid today's language wars

As religion writers (and historians) know, the 1611 King James Version of the Bible begat the 1952 Revised Standard Version, which begat the 1989 New Revised Standard Version which now begets the new "Updated Edition" of the NRSV.

It’s the "NRSVue" — a surefire news topic. This Bible will be available in ebook format by Christmas and in print around next May 1.

Media might issue advance articles about this production or wait for reactions to the complete text from reviewers or local clergy and parishioners. A 36-page media memo provides an advance look, accessible here. For further queries contact Friendship Press at info@friendshippress.org or CEO Joseph Crockett at joseph@frienshippress.org.

The NRSV copyright is held by the National Council of Churches, a cooperative body of the “Mainline” Protestant and Orthodox denominations. It assigned this rewrite to the Society of Biblical Literature, a professional guild of university and seminary scholars, whose 63-member team made approximately 12,000 "substantive" changes and thousands more that are trivial. The team consulted African-American church leaders, a group said to be "historically excluded" from prior Bible translation projects.

The result "improves" upon the original NRSV policy "to eliminate masculine-oriented language when it can be done without altering passages that reflect the historical situation of ancient patriarchal culture." The church council says both of its versions seek to be "as free as possible from the gender bias inherent in the English language."

A typical example is saying "brothers and sisters" when the original Greek literally said only "brothers" but was referring generally to people of both genders. The update omits footnotes that specify what the Greek said. Plural pronouns will abound, which depending on the translation can occasionally make the antecedent unclear or miss the direct force of a singular pronoun. In the rewrite, the Bethlehem "wise men" are now "magi."

Both the 1989 and 2021 renditions leave language about God undisturbed. "He" is still permitted and He remains the "Lord" and "Father."


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Thinking about a newsy mystery: Why are Gideon Bibles vanishing from hotel nightstands?

Thinking about a newsy mystery: Why are Gideon Bibles vanishing from hotel nightstands?

Thanksgiving is once again upon us and with it the official start of the busy holiday travel season that extends through Christmas.

As Americans continue to cope with the ongoing pandemic, travel has seen a steady increase once again. That means packed airports and bumper-to-bumper traffic on most major highways starting Wednesday. It also means more people will be staying in hotels.

This brings us to an interesting and highly symbolic news story, one that deserves coverage.

I have done my share of travel — both in the United States and internationally — over my two decades working as a journalist. The few things you could always count on for much of that time was a newspaper at the front desk, usually USA Today, and a Bible in your nightstand.

Not anymore. Print is slowly dying, and newspaper readers have migrated to the internet in recent years.

What about those Bibles?

They, too, seem to be slowly disappearing. I noticed this past summer, while on a trip to Washington, D.C., that there was no Bible in my hotel room.

The phasing out of Bibles in hotel rooms is actually part of a steady trend across the country over the past few years. In 2016, Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel chain, typically supplied both a Bible and Book of Mormon in its rooms. But the company decided that forgoing religious materials was the way to go at two of its hipper hotel brands such as Moxy and Edition. Note that both of these chains target younger guests.


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Want to see scholars fight? Ask if the book of Isaiah mentions a 'virgin birth'

THE QUESTION:

Should Bibles speak of a “virgin” birth in Isaiah 7:14?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

No less than 38 U.S. orchestras featured Handel’s “Messiah” in annual Christmas concerts during the 2015-16 season, making it “the runaway most-performed work,” according to a Baltimore Symphony survey. The beloved 1741 oratorio about Jesus Christ is also perhaps the most-performed piece across all of musical history — if we exclude “Happy Birthday to You.”

In this COVID Christmas, audiences must make do without live performances, but they may recall Handel’s setting for one of the Bible’s most-debated verses: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,” from Isaiah 7:14. This Old Testament verse is quoted in the New Testament’s Matthew 1:23 as foretelling Jesus’s birth to the Virgin Mary.

In Isaiah’s account, the Southern Kingdom of Judah based in Jerusalem faced military peril from an alliance the rival Northern Kingdom of Israel forged with Syria. Through the prophet Isaiah, God reassured Judah’s faithless King Ahaz that the kingdom of David would survive, giving the “sign” that the woman’s newborn son would be named Immanuel, meaning “God is with us.”

Verse 16 then proclaims that before this boy would be old enough to tell right from wrong, Judah’s enemies would fall. That indicates the prophecy applied literally or symbolically to a birth in Isaiah’s own time, possibly the prophet’s own son although Scripture never specifies who it was. In Christians’ “double meaning” interpretation, this prophecy applied both to Isaiah’s day and the coming of Jesus Christ seven centuries later.

(In addition to Matthew, the separate New Testament tradition in Luke 1:26-35 also reports that Jesus was born of a virgin, without quoting Isaiah.)

However, is “virgin” the right translation of the Hebrew word almah in Isaiah 7:14?


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Bible trivia time for hard-working religion scribes: What is a cubit? A shekel? An ephah?

Bible trivia time for hard-working religion scribes: What is a cubit? A shekel? An ephah?

THE QUESTION:

Bible trivia: How long is a cubit? What does a shekel weigh? How much does an ephah contain?

THE GUY’S ANSWER:

Readers of the Bible, particularly those wedded to the revered King James Version from four centuries ago, will keep running across esoteric words for weights and measures in ancient times. Many editions today help out by providing modern equivalents in the text or footnotes.

But don’t take those equivalents too literally. Specialist Marvin Powell’s advice is that “measures have always posed a special problem for translators.” He said it’s “almost impossible” to fix equivalents with much precision so we’re talking about rules of thumb — literally the thumb in one example below.

Ancient usage was approximate to begin with, and meanings varied by districts and eras. There appear to be differences before and after Israel’s exile in Babylon that began in 526 B.C., and between the Old and New Testament cultures. Powell figured that any proposed equivalents have a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent if not more.

This gets us into the development of metrology, the science of measurement. The Guy here relies especially on two historians of the ancient world, Powell of Northern Illinois University, writing in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, and D.J. Wiseman of the University of London, in the New Bible Dictionary.

Consider the Old Testament prophet Amos, who denounced corner-cutters who “trample on the needy” by dishonestly selling wheat so as to “make the ephah small and the shekel great” (8:5). That indicates measurements were inherently a bit flexible as tradesmen bargained over weights and prices in their ancient marketplaces.

The most frequent such term in the Bible is the famous “cubit,” which measured length.


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New Testament texts were handed down across centuries, so are they reliable?

THE QUESTION:

Can we rely upon New Testament texts that were copied and recopied over centuries?

THE GUY’S ANSWER:

It’s hard to think of any question more central for the Christian faith than that. The Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council and subsequent catechism proclaim that the New Testament books provide “the ultimate truth of God’s revelation.” The church “unhesitatingly affirms” that they “faithfully hand on” the “honest truth about Jesus” and the history of his words and deeds.

Yet consider this. If people were to be asked what’s their favorite saying of Jesus Christ, many would certainly choose his words while being executed upon the cross: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” Luke 23:34). Equally cherished is his admonition to the mob preparing to stone to death an adulterous woman: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7).

Careful Bible readers will note that most Bible versions on sale today, including those produced by conservative evangelicals, have footnotes stating in all candor that those two sayings are absent in early and widely recognized Gospel manuscripts in the original Greek language. That does not prove the sayings are not authentic but that it’s possible or likely they weren’t in the two Gospels as originally written.

The familiar King James (Protestant) and Douay-Rheims (Catholic) translations from centuries ago raise no such questions. But today’s Bibles note such findings from modern-day scholarship in the highly technical field of  “textual criticism,” which seeks to get us as close to the original writings as possible. The fact we have around 5,300 surviving manuscripts and fragments, a few of them quite early (vastly more evidence than with other 1st Century writings), means experts must evaluate and choose from many variations.

This situation led to doubts about New Testament credibility from a respected textual critic, Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina, in a scholarly work, “The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture” (1993).


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Perennial issue whenever journalists write about religion: Which Bible to quote?

Perennial issue whenever journalists write about religion: Which Bible to quote?

A recent item by GetReligion colleague Bobby Ross posed this perennial issue facing journalists and others writing about religion: “Which Bible to quote?

News articles had quoted Eugene Peterson’s The Message -- one man’s popular paraphrase and not quite a Bible -- and the New King James Version, a conservative fave that was an odd choice for a piece about liberal Protestants.

Once upon a time the (original) King James Version from 1611 sufficed. Its wordings were  familiar to a broad swath of English readers, indeed often memorized. Though the King was Protestant, generally similar verbiage appeared in Catholicism’s old Douay-Rheims translation (1609), and even moreso in the Jewish Publication Society’s The Holy Scriptures (1917).  

Today, however, a dozen or more modern options are in regular use, thus creating our tricky problem. Ross, who like The Guy is an Associated Press alum, noted that the wire’s influential Stylebook offers ample guidance about the Bible but doesn’t address how to decide which version to quote. “Please help me out here, friends,” Ross asked, so the ever-friendly Religion Guy responds herewith. 

When The Guy was teaching an adult Bible class recently, one participant brought along The Message. Its differences with standard Bibles sparked some pointed discussions. Such personal paraphrases -- also including Kenneth Taylor’s The Living Bible and J.B. Phillips’s elegantly British New Testament in Modern English -- are useful for private study and devotions. But they’re not really Bible translations, so a more literal version should also be consulted for comparisons.

Likewise, in most situations writers should cite a Bible closer to the original text that expresses the consensus from a panel of experts.  

Obviously, if a person is quoting a Bible passage verbatim you’ll go with that wording, even if it’s a paraphrase.


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