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

In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible.

THE VERSIONS of the Bible we choose to carry, display and read are good indices of who we are. Peter Thuesen presents a history of the creation of a translation that became a kind of badge for many, the Revised Standard Version. He explores the controversy that attended its publication and the aftermath of that controversy. He analyzes the attempts of the men who produced the RSV to respond to the criticisms it engendered, and the efforts of some conservative Protestants to create an alternative to it--efforts that eventually led to the publication of the New International Version.

In the hands of a mediocre scholar an analysis of these events might have been of merely antiquarian interest. But because Thuesen, a lecturer at Yale Divinity School and one of the editors of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, is an unusually creative and intelligent scholar who writes vividly and gracefully, his book will appeal to a wide audience.

The movement to create what eventually became the RSV began in 1930. In 1946, the RSV New Testament appeared, and a translation of the complete biblical text was released in 1952. This release was accompanied by a good deal of fanfare. One ad for the book proclaimed that its appearance was the "Greatest Bible News in 341 Years."

To the chagrin of the men who produced it, the RSV was soon under fierce assault. One Protestant leader said that its publication was the "vilest, boldest, most deliberately devilish attack upon the holy Word of God" in all of Christian history. The U.S. Air Force Reserve published a manual that warned recruits not to use the RSV. State legislators in Michigan denounced it as a threat to national security. And a Baptist minister, Martin Luther Hux, staged a public and highly publicized incineration of one of its pages.

Why the great controversy? As Thuesen points out, it was occasioned, in part, by the links between the RSV and the National Council of Churches, an organization viewed with great suspicion by some conservative Protestants. And some of the men who oversaw the translation were not thought of as being wholeheartedly committed to Americanism. (Indeed one of them, Henry Joel Cadbury, was an admitted pacifist!)

Thuesen does a particularly good job of demonstrating the degree to which the controversy was related to Protestantism's lack of consensus about a fundamental scriptural question: Is the Hebrew Bible a Jewish or a Christian text? The Christians who created the RSV, people like William Albright and Luther Weigle, had begun to drift away from the common Protestant assumption that the Hebrew Bible can be properly understood only if it is read within the context of the truths to be found in the New Testament. They had gone so far as to ask a Jew, Harry Orlinsky, to play a role--carefully delineated and fairly small--in translating the Hebrew Bible.

Those who attacked the RSV, people like Carl McIntire and Gerald Winrod, believed that the Hebrew Bible was intended for the benefit of the Christian church and that anyone who tried to understand the Hebrew Bible outside of the context of the Christian faith was bound to fail. They called Orlinsky a "hostile infidel Jew" and asserted that such a man had no proper role to play in the translation of the Word of God. They were convinced that the Hebrew Bible ought to be translated in a way that made it clear that it was in large part about Jesus Christ.

They were upset by what they saw as the RSV's mistranslation of Isaiah 7:14. Rendering the Hebrew word almah as "young woman" was right if your primary concern was doing justice to the meaning of the Hebrew. But if your primary concern was the unity of the Protestant Bible, then you had to ignore the literal meaning of the Hebrew word and opt for "virgin." The New International Version was produced by people who were committed to unity and who emphasized the supposed christological links between the two testaments. Their translation of the Hebrew Bible made it seem natural to read it as an old testament that had been superseded by the new.

Many people regard this insistence on the Christianness of the Hebrew Bible as extremely suspect. But it has played a huge role in determining the way Protestant Christians have read their Bibles. The idea that 39 books of the Bible are not in any straightforward way Christian in outlook or intent is still hard for many of us to accept. Because Thuesen's remarkable book forces us to rethink our habit of reading the Tanakh as though it were Christian, it deserves a careful reading by women and men who care about the history and present condition of American Protestantism.

Reviewed by David Watt, who is associate professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia.

What version of the Bible do various denominations use? Mormons accept the KJV as canon.

Below are some customer reviews from Amazon:

Customer Review

Thorough History of Protestant Bible in English in the United States. "In Discordance with the Scriptures" by Peter J. Thuesen, sub-titled "American Protestant Battles Over Translating The Bible". Oxford University Press, 1999. This book presents a history of the revisions of the English translations of the Bible, Old and New Testaments. The book has, however, another central theme: the dilemma that Protestants face when they proclaim, "Sola Scriptura", or "scripture alone", while denying the necessity of a church body to pass on the acceptability of each revision. As a papist, I rely on the Pope to say that one version or another can be printed: "imprimatur". "In Discordance with the Scriptures", points out that Protestants have no such authority. This book records the arguments of Protestants in the United States over the authority that would accept (or reject) each new English translation. The old King James Version, "...deeply internalized by many Americans, and tacitly assumed to be the very Word of God, began to lose its unchallenged cultural hegemony". Page 42. It has always been a wonder to me that Protestants, who effectively demand the separation of church and state, tolerate a Bible with a King's name on it: a bible authorized by an alien king (James was a Scot, you know).

The author, Dr. Peter J. Thuesen, spends a good portion of the first two chapters on the influence that the Tyndale Bible had on the foundation of the translations of the Hebrew and Greek versions into English. Tyndale's work predates the King James Version (as does the Catholic English Bible, the Douay-Rheims version). Dr. Thuesen is ecumenical enough to mention the encyclical of Pope Pius XII, "Divino Afflante Spiritu" (Page 80), which encouraged Catholic scholarship in biblical matters in the late 1950s.

The book records the difficulties that different Protestant sects or denominations had with the translations that affected theological matters. For example, Isaiah 7:14, was given as child born to at "virgin" as a child born to a "young woman". Dr. Thuesen reaches to John Calvin and into the New Testament accounts of the Virgin Birth (Matthew 1:23) to defend the propriety of the literally correct translation of Isaiah as "young woman". The author further records that it is lamentable that in today's age a "young woman" is not synonymous with a "virgin".

Interestingly enough, throughout the book, the author considers the King James Version to be somewhat lacking in accuracy, and that the new revisions, such as the Revised Standard Version, (RSV), are better translations, clarifying some poorer renditions. He does not cover, however, the Christmas story from Luke, which I remember, as a young boy, noting that that Catholic version was "Peace on earth to men of good will", while the English King James version stated, "Peace on earth, good will to men". Big difference! Today, we have, "..Peace on earth to those on whom His favor rests". This brings up style. I wish that Dr. Thuesen had addressed style variations more completely. For example, again using Luke's account of Christmas, "A decree went forth from Caesar Augustus that the whole world was to be censored." is probably not acceptable in this politically correct, democratic world where emperors and dictators have been replaced by the democracy of the people. I would have like to see what Dr. Thuesen could have done with the changes in bible translations as the political scene in the world has changed.

As a practicing Christian (Roman Catholic, but still a Christian), I wanted the book to cover more on the ecumenically acceptable translations of the Bible. The book's last chapter, "Epilogue" ended too soon for me, and I would recommend that future editions expand to consider Protestant/Catholic efforts on translations. Further, there is a need for a history or consideration of translations into other common languages. For example, a Seventh Day Adventist, who knocked on my door, became angry when I showed him that Luther's translation called "Exodus", "The First Book of Moses". In all, this book, by Peter J. Thuesen, is well written by a literate man, who attempts to present all sides fairly.

Customer Review

This book narrates the struggles within American Protestantism between liberals and evangelicals over the translation of the Bible. Written in a lucid academic style, the book reveals the bitter disputes and political wrangling that took place particularly over the publication of the RSV. One of the key insights of the writer is the struggle by evangelicals to uphold the self-authenticating nature of the Bible when clearly what was needed was some external authority akin to the external authority of the papacy in Catholicism. Whereas in Catholicism this authority lay in Rome, in Protestantism it usually took the form of various political and religious alliances (such as the NCC). Many books have been written that do a verse-by-verse comparison of translations and try to decide, "which is best". This book goes beyond that in an attempt to understand the etiology for the Protestant preoccupation with the "best translation". It also explains the political dynamics that led to the formation of the RSV and NIV. First class.

Customer Review

The subtitle is American Protestant Battles Over Translating the Bible, but the heart of the book is really the RSV (Revised Standard Version) vs. NIV (New International Version) controversy. The curtain of public veneer is pulled back on the ideological translation wars, to reveal a compelling tale rife with politics, posturing, and power struggles. The introduction gets off on the wrong foot, with some esoteric blather about epistemological hermeneutics (or some such sespequedalian verbiage) and iconoclastic biblicism, that seemed pointless to me, other than as filler. I suggest you skip the introduction and get right into the book itself. Early on, the author takes some unwarranted stabs at William Tyndale, that only aggravated the situation.

But once you get into the controversies surrounding the Revised Standard Version translation, the author hits his stride, and the fascinating story behind this influential translation begins to unfold. Then the fundamentalist-reactionary NIV is introduced, and the plot thickens palpably. Great nuts-and-bolts, blood-and-guts reading. I found myself almost unable to put the book down at this point, since this subject fascinates me, and it seems very little is written on the subject. This battlefield history is obviously the author's strong suit, and he plays it well.

He comes across with a hard-boiled cynicism, that at times can be a little grating, and at other times, gives his work an edge. When he philosophizes about the implications of various ideologies, he seems on less solid ground. His observations are trenchant without being incisive. Ultimately, the author's thesis was unclear in my mind. Should Bible translators NOT strive to get closer to a perfect ideal of the "inspired original?" What role should religious bias play in the translation process?

But no matter. Despite that, and despite an ending that fizzles rather abruptly, the strength of the story survives its weaknesses, and what emerges is a fascinating, well-researched and well-documented battle history of Christendom's American Bible Translation Civil War of the mid-century. I wish such a treatise was available for every translation out there!

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