bacht

Well, the NRSV team claim to be doing as literal a translation as possible while maintaining homage to the tradition of Tyndale and the KJV. No translation is ever perfect or ever will be.

afaik the gender-neutrality you speak of wouldn't apply in every passage, only some where the original verbs or nouns don't directly match our usage.

Where they would claim their aim is clarity you seem to be charging obscurantism.

spin

I'm not too convinced about this gender neutrality stuff. It is true that in some languages one can say for example "brothers" and mean "brothers and sisters". This is because the word for "brother" is only distinguished from "sister" because of a gender ending and by convention the plural form of the masculine can be either "brothers" or "brothers and sisters". However, in the Greek of Mt 19:29 (& parallels) for example we find both adelfous and adelfas, masculine and feminine plural forms (accusative), so there is no problem of being gender specific to be inclusive. If one wanted to in Greek one could be gender inclusive, suggesting that the NRSVers are going beyond the text.


spin

jon-eli

I'm charging two things, as far as I know:

(a) That the translators fancy themselves to be mind readers; and
(b) That they mangle sentence structure in order to remain gender-neutral.

As to the first point, I think that if the authors of the biblical texts had been writing in English, they wouldn't have bothered with gender-neutral language, just as many people today don't bother with it, even when they don't intend to exclude females. This would seem to be the default position, but the translators of the NRSV have other ideas.

As to the second, I think the translators have made a tradeoff, and that the result favours gender-neutral language over accurate sentence structure. I don't like this, but I understand it's a subjective call and they can't hope to please everyone.

JoeWallack

JW:
Ahem. Chapter One is A Historical Assault on Faith. Ehrman claims that the Bible is the most misunderstood book by the public. This is because professionals have not done a good job of communicating to the public and clergy have chosen not to communicate. Ehrman asserts that his important observations regarding the Bible are the views of "the majority of serious critical scholars teaching in the universities and seminaries". According to Ehrman the public has a devotional approach to the Bible which concentrates on the supposed meaning to the individual and/or our society. The approach of professionals is the "historical-critical" method which concentrates on the meaning to the author and the author's society.

The original issue for Ehrman as an Inerrantist was textual variation. This convinced Ehrman that we lack what was originally written and he became a non-fundamentlist Christian for the next 15 years. What caused Ehrman to leave Christianity was when he could not reconcile faith in god with the state of the world.

Ehrman ends the chapter with his key assertions for the book:

1) "faith in the Bible as the historically inerrant and inspired Word of God-cannot be sustained in light of what we as historians know about the Bible."

2) "The views I set out in this book are standard fare among scholars."



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

temporalillusion

Thanks for that.

Don't really need another go-over of why he believes the way he does now, but not everyone would have read some of his other books.

Might not be anything new or interesting for those well versed, but I'm sure I'll pick this up, mostly because I as a layperson have very little idea what standard fare is for scholars. I know before I read Ehrman, I had no idea the subject of textual criticism even existed, so his self-appointed task of bringing this kind of information to the masses through non-scholarly books is worthwhile I think.

jon-eli

The non-scholarly masses be damned; they either believe what they want to believe, or they listen to one scholar to the exclusion of all others. They could do worse than Ehrman, but I really wonder if he's got anything new to say. Since his target audience is non-scholarly, he tends to rehash basic points ad nauseum, and frequently duplicates content from one book to the next. It's often not only the same argument, but the exact same words too... He could have collated it all into one massive tome, and I would buy that tome and probably read it occasionally. But then again I'm just talking nonsense, since Ehrman was the one who got me interested in this subject to begin with. I should send him roses or something. But I still wonder if he isn't overshadowing other scholars with his dastardly pop-cultural celebrity. He's probably going to be offered a permanent position writing fluff-pieces for the NY Times, and when that happens: death to all things good and holy.

JoeWallack

JW:
As near as I can tell I am the foremost authority the world has ever known on errors in the Christian Bible. Periodically a Skeptic will ask me what the point is of pointing out errors in the Christian Bible. As fellow counter-missionary Ehrman implies in his book the cause of communicating to the public that the Christian Bible is substantially more in error quantitatively and qualitatively than is commonly believed will have the effect of making it less of an influence in our society. It's fine to use the Bible as a factor in making decisions but it should not be used as the factor. As long as parents can avoid criminal charges for denying medical care to their children because of religious beliefs and you can not be President if you do not believe that god sacrificed himself to himself thereby conquering death by dying to end a law that is eternal, more communication is needed.

I'll be cataloging all of Ehrman's claimed errors in Jesus, Interrupted at ErrancyWiki on this page Category: Jesus Interrupted



Joseph

Missionary. n. One who helps others solely for the benefit of themselves.

Counter-missionary. n. One who helps others solely for the benefit of others.

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Jayrok

I'm currently in chapter 4 of this book and have enjoyed it so far. Nothing new has been said as most of us are fully aware of the contradictions in the Bible. The purpose of his book seems to be to communicate the fact that the Bible is not without error and as such could not be considered the infallible word of God. His Christian audience would then be those fundamentalists who claim all of the Bible is God's inspired, innerrent word.

Everything he talks about, according to him, is taught in Seminary and advanced Biblical studies. It's the layperson who may not know of these issues because they tend to read the Bible devotionally as opposed to critically. So this is his attempt to "get the word" out to the masses that there are indeed problems associated with the perfect Bible.

The contradiction section offers nothing new but I'm looking forward to getting into other chapters.

My lone complaint at this time is the work of the editor is not very good. Whoever edited this book didn't do a thorough job. I've come across a couple of spots that I had to go back and read again because it didn't make sense, then I realized he really meant to say another word other than what was printed. But not a big deal, just attention to detail.

jon-eli

One thing I've noticed is that people seem to differ on their definition of "error." In the interests of clarity, anyone who'd like to share their take on this is quite welcome.

When we use that word "error," are do we mean (a) that the writer made a mistake, or do we mean (b) that if we interpret the writer literally, then we are the ones making a mistake. Take for example Mark's designation of "Abiathar" as the high priest, when the latter's father was actually high priest at the time... It's such a seemingly straight-forward case of muddlement on the part of Mark, but the problem is we cannot know for sure that Mark had in mind the same thing as we do when it comes to that passage. That is, we cannot prove (a), nor can we ever. We can prove (b), which I think is a much more useful thing to do. But anyone who insists on a literal interpretation of the gospels, is already in this case forced to interpret allegorically and realize that rhetoric was more important to Mark than accuracy. We might call this point (c), and I think it is more useful than both (a) and (b) put together, because ultimately, the kind of people who revel in discovering compositional slip-ups in the bible, don't merely intend to reinforce their own beliefs (i.e., that the bible is muddled, contradictory, factually erroneous, and therefore of little use as a religious document), but also intend to spread this information into Christian inerrantist circles, and hope that this is the equivalent of kicking a time-bomb into a small room, shutting the door, and waiting for the bang. You can't prove (a); inerrantists agree with (b) anyway, they just don't know it yet; therefore (c) is the most important point to get across, but I don't see it being done very often.

Anyone feel like tearing me a new one for that spiel?

Toto

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