(text should definitely be altered to increase market share)
As timing would have it, my friend Bo Sanders just posted on “the last taboo”: Extremely White Male and Incredibly Homophobic.
This isn’t really about translating. It’s about foreclosing a discussion. It’s easier to win an argument if you simply rewrite the text being discussed. That and market share.
Ever since the world “homosexual” made its first appearance in the Bible in 1946 for the Revised Standard Version, scholars who want their Bibles to ship have faced a lot of pressure to keep the new word in their translations. And since I’m not aware of any new concensus that malakoi and arsenokoitai mean “homosexual” after all, I can only guess that adding even more anti-gay language to the Bible comes from less than pure motives.
The TNIV got in hot water with the Southern Baptist crowd last year over using gender-inclusive language (as if Paul would be talking to women too when he addresses a whole church). Well the new New International Version- still the top seller after nearly three decades- has decided to one-up them for the Baptist market.
These clarifications include the verse in 1 Corinthians 6:9, where the 1984 NIV version uses the phrase “homosexual offenders,” while the 2011 translation changes the phrase to “men who have sex with men.”
…
In Romans 1:26, the verse “even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones,” was changed to, “even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.” While in Leviticus 18:22, the verse “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman,” was changed to, “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman.”
There are six verses in the entire Bible that might hint at gay relationships and only 3 have ever had the word “homosexual” written into a translation- so at least the new NIV won’t have much to tamper with. But still, regardless of how this lines up with your perspective, even the most conservative reader should be concerned when disputed terms are solved by simply changing what the text says.
As with my post yesterday on evolution, I really look forward to the not too distant future when we no longer have to have this conversation.
Read the rest of the article here.
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