Religion: New Bibles

On a June day last year, a group of scholars stood up from their work in a book-cluttered room of the Yale Divinity School to say a short prayer together. It was an important moment for learning and for Protestantism. After 14 years of patient work, their 32-man committee had completed the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the most important English translation of the Scriptures since a slightly larger group of English scholars handed their three-year work to King James I in 1611.

This week the Revised Standard Version was published in the U.S. (Nelson; $6) in a first printing of 1,000,000 copies. A conservative-looking maroon buckram volume on the outside, the new Bible has some surprises for the conservative reader inside. Such familiar Biblical words as “Jehovah” and “Calvary,” for example, are nowhere to be found; the editors held them to be medieval usages, without particular justification, and replaced them with “Lord,” and “the place which is called The Skull.” Such familiar circumlocutions as “And it came to pass . . .” have also disappeared.

Since many Protestants object to changing a jot or a tittle of the King James wording, Chairman Luther Weigle, dean emeritus of Yale Divinity School, and his fellow translators prepared a full statement of their guiding principles. Its substance: not only is the text of the King James version weighed down with old words and phrases, not used in modern English, but the Greek and Hebrew texts on which it is based were often faulty and sometimes misleading. “The Greek New Testament they used,” says Dean Weigle, “had five to six thousand errors.”*

The translators of the Revised Standard Version have benefited by a whole modern cycle in Biblical scholarship. In the last 70 years, scholars and archaeologists have dug out of the sands of Egypt and the Holy Land a score of manuscripts, most of them far earlier than anything the17th century translators of the Bible knew about.

Although the committee had the backing of the National Council of Churches—and themselves represented most major Protestant denominations—they approached their translations not as theologians, but as scholars seeking the most authoritative text. Some of their changes are sure to rouse controversy. In Isaiah 7:14—”Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son”—they have substituted “young woman” for virgin, on the basis of a 2nd century text. In Luke 2:14 the angels no longer say “. . . on earth peace, good will toward men.” The Revised Standard Version: “. . . and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased.”t

Some changes were obvious. To make sense in 20th century English, “Libertines” became “Freedmen,” “feeble minded” was changed to “faint-hearted,” and “mortify” to “put to death.” All the poetic passages in the Old Testament (40% of the whole including the Psalms) were translated in blank verse.

The year before the Protestants began working on the Revised Version, U.S. Roman Catholics began a new English translation of their own. The purpose was similar—to replace the 1609 Douay Bible,† which shares most of the faults but not nearly all the noble language of the King James version. Since the Latin Bible of St. Jerome (Vulgate) is still the officially recognized text of the Roman Catholic Church, the Catholic scholars set out merely to retranslate St. Jerome, without officially referring to the original Hebrew and Greek.

But in the midst of their work, in 1943, Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical expressly urging Catholic scholars to make translations from original texts. “The Biblical scholar,” the Pope wrote, “who . . . would deprive himself of access to the original texts, could in no wise escape the stigma of levity and sloth.” The Catholic Biblical Association raised its sights. In Washington, a committee of 37 Roman Catholic scholars, headed by Father Louis Hartman of Catholic University, started work on a translation of the Old and New Testaments from the original.

This week the first eight books (Genesis through Ruth) of the Catholic Confraternity Bible were published. (The whole work will not be finished until 1955.) As with the Revised Standard Version, the Confraternity Bible has its changes of words and phrases,! but the essentials will be undisturbed. Said Father Roland Murphy, an associate editor of the Confraternity Bible: “Expecting great, important changes in the Bible through new translations is the red herring of Bible science. There won’t be any.”

*The original translation was revised by Bishop Challoner in 1752 and slightly modernized in subsequent translations. It has remained, however, the basic Catholic text of the Bible in English.

†Sample (Judges 5:7): The Douay Version: “The valiant men ceased, and rested in Israel: until Debbora arose, a mother arose in Israel.” The Confraternity Bible: “Gone was freedom beyond the walls, gone indeed jrom Israel. When I, Debora, rose, when I rose, a mother in Israel.”