Jason David BeDuhn,
Truth in
Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New
Testament.
University Press of America. 2003.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
This marvel of clarity (both in thought and in
expression) is perfect for use as a textbook, but its perspicacity isn’t
going to hurt anyone else, either. It immediately struck me how this
book is a natural companion piece to Bart Ehrman’s The Orthodox
Corruption of Scripture. Ehrman demonstrated that numerous scribal
“errors” in early New Testament manuscripts were actually instances of
Christological redaction on the part of scribes who thought to improve
scripture by making it heresy-proof, cutting the proof texts out from
under any who might appeal to them in service of Brand X Christologies.
But it is too late to fudge texts in the copying process ever since the
advent of printed books. What one can do to improve the Bible
theologically, though, is to smuggle one’s theology into one’s
translation. And BeDuhn
shows how often this very thing has happened, again, usually in the
interest of protecting “high” Christology from the Bible. Yes,
Virginia, the New Testament, as near as the lexical evidence can tell
us, does call Jesus Christ “a god” (John 1:1) and “the first-born of
creation” (Colossians 2:15-20). People are said to have bowed before
Jesus, not to have worshipped him. What he declined to do in Philippians
2:6-11 was to usurp equality with God, not to sit on it. It should say,
as the despised New World Translation and Living Bible have it, “I
existed before Abraham did” (John 8:58). The notion that the Johannine
Jesus made reference to the “I am” self-revelation of Exodus 3:14 is a
fantasy; the accent in all the “I am” sayings must be the various
predicates. Do various (Deutero-)Pauline passages mean to extol “the
great God and our savior Jesus Christ” or “our great God and savior
Jesus Christ”? BeDuhn admits we cannot know. He thinks it unlikely that
Hebrews 1:8 means to address the exalted Christ thusly: “Your throne, O
God, is forever and ever,” preferring “God is your throne for ever and
ever,” though I think he ignores the lingering influence of the ancient
Divine King ideology on the original Psalm, picked up by the author to
the Hebrews, whose high Christology allowed him to rediscover the
(polytheistic) slant of the Psalm quote.
I am making it sound as if
the author has definitively settled these issues, which are surely still
going to be debated till Doomsday. But I don’t mind leaving such an
impression, for BeDuhn’s arguments seem refreshingly cogent, clear, and
comprehensive. He puts out to pasture various bogus grammatical rules
that almost seem, like the grammar of Koranic Arabic, to have been
fashioned to protect the text from heresy. He is forthright in
expressing the obvious but ecumenically correct explanation: most
Protestant translators work under the gun, pressured to make the alleged
source of their doctrines reflect those (post-biblical) doctrines after
the fact. The two most neutral, Greek-faithful translations turn out to
be the Roman Catholic New American Bible and the Jehovah’s Witnesses New
World Translation, a reworking of the American Standard Bible. BeDuhn
speculates that Catholics can be freer with the details of the text
because they don’t have to pretend to find their theology in it in
full-blown form. He suspects that the Witnesses had similar freedom
because they had cast off the baggage of orthodoxy and approached the
text with fresh eyes. That certainly seems to be true of Charles Taze
Russell, their founder. On the other hand, BeDuhn turns right around and
shows the arbitrariness of the New World Translation’s importation of
the name Jehovah into the New Testament, and the theological bias
implied in their refusing to do so in the case of Old Testament quotes
where using “Jehovah” in a passage applied to Jesus would imply a higher
Christology than they accept. BeDuhn confesses that he, too, has a bias,
and that is to try to let the ancient texts speak for themselves,
stripping away biased theological mistranslations. Bravo! May we all be
so “biased”!