The Uncensored Bible

<h2 class="mobile"><a href="http://JonathansCorner.mobi/?url=@__URL__@">Mobile Site</a></h2> <h1>The Uncensored Bible</h1> <p>Unfortunately, the Bibles we have tend to be censored. For instance, when Elijah is having his great contest with the prophets of Baal, he says, "Maybe Baal is thinking, or he has gone aside, or is on a journey, or maybe he is sleeping and needs to be woken up." What doesn't come through in the translation is that Elijah's second suggestion is the Old Testament equivalent of saying, "Baal... can't come to the phone right now."</p> <p>That sort of thing wouldn't scratch the surface of what is censored out of the Song of Songs. The rumor about the Song of Songs in the New International Version is as follows: when the scholars were first working on the New International Version they translated the Song of Songs into clear English just like the other sixty-five books they were translating. Big mistake, and they should have known better, or at least that's what bureaucrats and money bags decided. The net result of <em>that</em> was... The scholars were forced to go against their best judgment for much of one book of the Bible, and the New International Version has a very watered-down version of the Song of Songs. Not that this is a unique feature of the New International Version: none of the major English translations I'm aware of will give a <em>real</em> translation of the Song of Songs, and while I'm very wary of claiming a real translation of some poetry that's very difficult to translate, I will say that the version of the Song of Songs provided is not intentionally written to keep the reader from understanding what's actually going on in the text.</p> <p>But does it really matter if we clean up the Bible a bit? That is the most palatable way of saying that we know better than God what has a place in Holy Scripture. If we need to remove something that the Church teaches is God-inspired Scripture to fit our notions of (in this case) decency, perhaps it is our notions of decency that need to be adjusted to meet God's standard of decency and not the other way around. "A little bit of innocent cleaning up" isn't so innocent, and it's usually a red flag that the person advocating the cleaning up doesn't recognize what is being lost, <em>not</em> that the change is innocent.</p> <p>There are other things that don't seem to come through in translation, and not all of them are considered dirty. Some of the censorship is doctrine that is in the text but the translators translate out as much as possible, although I have only identified one really major area of doctrinal censorship, related to something that is preserved in the Orthodox Church but lost in much of the Protestant world. The Sermon on the Mount has a double meaning in one verse that could be translated either, "And which of you can add a single hour to his life by worrying?" or "And which of you can make yourself a foot and a half taller by worrying?" <em>This is a pun</em>, and the effect is much the same thing as saying, "Do you think you can add a single <em>hour</em> to your life by worrying? You might as well try to worry yourself into being over a foot taller!"</p> <p>Those were the couple of seeds that went into starting this project. Since then, I have a disagreement with one side of a present debate and a more subtle disagreement with another: the debate concerns whether translation should be literal, keeping as close to a word-for-word equivalent as possible, and how much of a dynamic equivalent, something that has the same overall effect as the original text and is usually a freer translation.</p> <p>Two somewhat obnoxious quotes have some relevance here:</p> <ul> <li><p>The King James Version is a wonderful monument of Elizabethan English which should respectfully be permitted to rest in peace.</p></li> <li><p>The problem with the King James Version is the translators' shaky grasp of Hebrew, and the problem with all modern translations is the translators' increasingly shaky grasp of English.</p></li> </ul> <p>These quotes touch on why the translation differs in approach somewhat both from the two ends of the spectrum, the "literal translation" and the "dynamic equivalent." Usually people think of these two as simply the two basic options, and you have to be somewhere in between these two. But this is not the most helpful set of options, and the big picture is why I like those two quotes and place them side-by-side.</p> <p>Literal translations, also known as word-for-word translations or formal equivalents, give something that can be very valuable but hard to understand: a translation that is only halfway to working like English. They can be very confusing if you haven't had a lot of experience with them and you're not a scholar.</p> <p>Dynamic equivalents don't answer the question, "How can I give a word-for-word equivalent?" but instead answer, "What is an equivalent today that will hit people with the same impact as what the text had then?" This is much easier to understand but it makes the text something from today's world and translates out things that are from the text's world.</p> <p>The idea behind the Uncensored Bible is to help the reader see into the ancient worlds and convey the world of the Bible. It's very imperfect, but the basic idea instead of trying to be as close word-for-word as you can, or making the text work like something written yesterday, is to help the reader understand and see into the text with its own world. And the choice about how literal to be is a choice that is answered with, "How can the reader be helped to see into the text's world?"</p> <p>Separate words are usually used for two Greek words which are usually translated as "time" so that the differences between them are collapsed. (The words are "chronos" and "kairos.") The Lord's name in Hebrew is translated "HE WHO IS," and some things are much more literal than most translations.</p> <p>On the other hand, some passages like Luke 10:25-37 (an incident which contains the story about the Good Samaritan as part of a larger picture) give the text more breathing room in order to convey something that slips through the cracks in other translations I've read. Overall I think the text is an initial exploration of an interesting approach, with some interesting food for thought, even if it shouldn't be your only or even primary Bible translation.</p> <p>There are a lot of things this version is <em>not</em>. In particular it is really not the best for devotional use, which is a rather glaring weakness in a Bible translation. It is limited, a special-purpose translation but I think it does a limited task in an interesting and perhaps helpfully challenging way: it is not good competition for a standard translation, but in a limited way it does something standard translations don't do, at least not yet.</p> <p>There are a lot of things this version is <em>not</em>. In particular it is really not the best for devotional use, which is a rather glaring weakness in a Bible translation. It is limited, a special-purpose translation but I think it does a limited task in an interesting and perhaps helpfully challenging way: it is not good competition for a standard translation, but in a limited way it does something standard translations don't do, at least not yet.</p> <p>I hope to bring a little bit of non-academic writing to the table, if only a very little in a few of the passages that suffer most in translation and other gulfs. I was going to say, "and spiritual perception," but the spiritual perception involved has been basic; I've offered more of a timebound interest in history, the form of people's thought, and cultures. I am sorely aware that the text will show my own limitations, not to mention other inadequacies, but besides uncensoring certain passages I am trying to not so much to provide a good translation as to provide a spur to those working on translating the Bible to attend to something translations haven't paid enough attention to. I'm willing to leave fingerprints, even if those fingerprints will inevitably contain limitations that need to serve as a minor complement to a standard Bible translation, or even better <strong><a href="http://www.powells.com/partner/24934/biblio/0310918367">buy a "parallel Bible" that will let you compare several translations in parallel:</a></strong> this translation will tell you things those translations won't, but it's better read alongside other translations, either the other translations published with it online (the link below points to a tool that will let you compare it to other translations), or a parallel Bible. I remember being very happy when I owned my first parallel Bible, because it let me see things in a way I had never been able to see before, and <strong><a href="http://www.powells.com/partner/24934/biblio/0310918367">buying a parallel Bible is buying one of the best-kept secrets for people who want to get past the limits of a single translation without studying ancient languages</a></strong>. I  think that this translation does something I've failed to find another translation that does, let alone be this accessible from the Internet.</p> <p>Most the New Testament and Protestant Old Testament are originally taken from the <a href="http://ebible.org">World English Bible</a>; most of the Apocrypha are taken from the <a href="http://powerbible.info?BibleVersion=KJV">King James Version</a>, and III-IV Maccabees and Psalm 151 are taken from <a href="http://www.ecmarsh.com/lxx/">Sir Lancelot Brenton's translation of the Septuagint</a>, and the translation is modified from that starting point. Septuagint</a>, and the translation is modified from that starting point. (<em>Many</em> thanks to the translators whose work I have relied on.)</p> <p><a href="/powerbible.cgi?lookupMode=concordance&BibleVersion=Uncensored">Use the concordance for the Uncensored Bible.</a></p> <p><a href="/powerbible.cgi?lookupMode=passage&BibleVersion=Uncensored">Look up passages in the Uncensored Bible.</a></p>