Bible,
1990. Bruce M. Metzger et al., The
New Revised Standard Version. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
This is a revision of the Revised
Standard Version on the basis of the
UBS third edition (see Aland
Black Metzger Wikren Martini 1975).
It modernizes and simplifies the
language of the RSV, and also revises it
in the interest of
"gender-inclusiveness." In
general, the translation is less literal
than the RSV, but more literal than the New
International Version.
The deliberately non-Christian
interpretation of the Old Testament
which made the RSV unacceptable to
conservatives is continued in this
revision. In fact the most notorious
verse of the RSV, Isaiah 7:14, in the
NRSV is moved even further away from its
connection with the New Testament. The
RSV had rendered it "a young woman
shall conceive" (future); but the
NRSV has "the young woman is with
child" (present), which effectively
prevents the Christological
interpretation (and there is no footnote
to inform the reader that the RSV's
"shall conceive" is a
possibility).
The inclusive language alterations are
very thorough, involving thousands of
alterations designed to completely erase
the Bible's generic masculine pronouns
and other usages offensive to feminists.
An attempt has been made to downplay the
extent to which this policy was imposed
upon the committee by the National
Council of Churches (the copyright
holder, which in 1980 also commissioned
the Inclusive Language Lectionary as
another revision of the RSV), but it is
evident that it did not arise
spontaneously from a consensus of the
translators themselves. Barry Hoberman,
writing in the Atlantic Monthly [1]
near to the end of the work on the NRSV,
reported the following comments from
members of the committee:
"The
basic principle that the RSV committee
uses is that we will remove all
masculine-dominated language that has
been introduced by the
translators," says George MacRae,
who serves on the New Testament panel.
Thus, no attempt will be made to
disguise the fact that every book of
the Bible is the product of a
thoroughly male-dominated society. To
pretend that the ancient Near Eastern
world of the Bible was not radically
different from our own world would be
to deprive Scripture of its historical
context. "I think it's part of
God's revelation in history that we
take history, and we take the time-boundedness
of a biblical writer, seriously,"
says William Holladay, an Old
Testament panel member who teaches at
Andover Newton Theological School, in
Massachusetts. "Then, it's the
teaching task of the church or the
synagogue, it seems to me, to say,
'Well, all right, Jeremiah said it
this way. What God intends through
those words may be something a little
bit different, so let's talk about
that for a while.'"
These quotations would seem to indicate
that McRae and Hollady, at least, were
unaware of how thoroughly the
gender-neutral language policy was about
to be implemented in the final editing
stages of the NRSV.
J.J.M. Roberts, another member of the
NRSV translation committee, later
published an article [2]
in which he protested against the
"tyrannical and arbitrary
authority" assumed by the final
editorial committee which had been
elected to revise the translation for
"stylistic consistency":
…
the members of this editorial
committee understood their task as
involving a far greater authority to
revise the translation than the full
committee ever intended. According to
Dentan [one of the five members of the
committee], 'This editorial committee
was given power to determine the final
form of the text before publication.'
Such a formulation is dangerously
ambiguous. What the full committee
understood and intended as the task of
the editorial committee was actually
quite limited; while respecting the
basic work of the full committee, the
editorial committee was expected to
make the relatively minor changes to
the finished product that were
necessary for the sake of stylistic
consistency. At least in the case of
the Old Testament editorial
subcommittee, that is not what
happened. Some hint of the far more
intensive reworking carried out by
this small committee … can be seen
in Dentan's account of non-scholarly
consideration that colored their work
… the editorial committee made
thousands of changes, some quite
substantive, to the translation of the
Old Testament made by the full
committee, and when members of the
full committee became aware of the
extent of these changes, many were
outraged, feeling that much of their
own work on the translation over the
years had been irresponsibly
gutted."
Roberts allows that the "inclusivity"
of the NRSV makes it well-suited
"for liturgical public
reading," but he points out that
this advantage has come at a real price.
After discussing the loss of
particularity, emphasis, concreteness,
and vividness in two passages of the Old
Testament (Psalms 1 and 41), he gives
the following comment on "brothers
and sisters" as a translation for adelphoi
in the New Testament:
It
is likely that Paul was using the
Greek term "brothers" in an
inclusive sense … Nonetheless, Paul
did not highlight a concern for
inclusivity by using the compound
expression "brothers and
sisters." To articulate this
concern in translation by expressing
what Paul left unexpressed is to
impose a twentieth century, western
cultural agenda on a first century
text. Such anachronistic glosses make
sociological or cultural appraisal of
the world of the original text more
difficult and cast doubts on the
reliability of such a translation for
serious historical work.
Despite such hard feelings and
complaints of the translators
themselves, [3]
the NRSV was quickly adopted as a
replacement of the RSV in the liberal
denominations associated with the
National Council of Churches. It has
also been favored by liberal university
professors, for use as a text in
"religion" courses. Two study
editions have appeared: The New
Oxford Annotated Bible (1991),
edited by Bruce Metzger and Roland
Murphy; and the HarperCollins Study
Bible (1993) edited by Wayne Meeks
and others. In both of these editions,
the introductions and annotations are
decidedly liberal.
Obviously, there is little chance of
this version becoming popular outside of
the shrinking "mainline"
churches for whom it was executed.
Indeed, it may be wondered whether any
considerable attention will given to it
even within these churches, in which the
exposition and study of the Bible has
practically ceased.
In a report on the National Council of
Churches' work of Bible translation to
the NCC general assembly held in
Oakland, California in November, 2001,
General Secretary Robert Edgar
"mentioned that the NCC is
exploring various possibilities
regarding the sale or license of the
copyright to the Revised and Newly
Revised Standard Versions of the Bible.
The NCC owns the copyrights to both
versions. Edgar noted that the NCC had
already refused one offer to purchase
the copyrights. He said that the NCC
would not exist today if it did not
receive $500,000 a year in royalties
from the sale of the RSV and NRSV
Bibles." [4]
1.
Barry Hoberman, "Translating the
Bible" in The Atlantic Monthly
Volume 255, No. 2 (February 1985), pages
43-58.
2.
J.J.M. Roberts, "An Evaluation of
the NRSV: Demystifying Bible
translation." Insights: A
Journal of the Faculty of Austin
Seminary 108/2 (1993), formerly the Austin
Seminary Bulletin.
3.
And for good measure we will note the
remarks of Robert Jewett, professor of
New Testament at Garrett-Northwestern
Theological Seminary. Jewett is himself
a liberal, and a supporter of the
feminist cause, but he insists upon the
obligation of liberal scholars to behave
honestly in translating the Bible.
Regarding the NRSV he says: "We're
facing, with the NRSV, liberal
dishonesty in spades. The modern
liberated perspective which imposes
itself on the text is about as dishonest
as you can be. All the way through the
NRSV, implying that Paul has all these
liberated concepts and so forth like the
current politically correct person in an
Ivy League school: I mean that's just
ridiculous. Here you have the imposition
of liberal prejudice on the biblical
text with the ridiculous assumption that
our modern liberal views were
Paul's." Against the specious
arguments offered by apologists for
these politically correct alterations,
Jewett declares that a gender-neutral
translation that claims to be accurate
is "almost as bad as Stalin's
revisions of world history in which
every 10 years he'd change all the
history textbooks." These remarks
were published in WORLD magazine,
vol. 16, no. 6 (Feb. 13, 1998).
4.
Jerald Walz, listserve news report, Ecumenical
Flagship Still Drifting, Taking on Water.
