 |
| "All your Bibles are belong to us." (From a famous video game.) |
The Union of Bible Societies and Roman Catholicism
The
Jerusalem Bible, an English translation of a Catholic
Bible, came out in 1966. My future wife and I began college that year, and the
Augustana Book Concern sold that Bible. That was the beginning of quarterly
releases of new Bibles, a profitable business. No matter what the initial cost
of translating might be, the break-even point comes soon enough, even faster
than hymnals. Every Bible after that break-even point is pure profit, minus the
cost of paper and ink.
A
Bible is a printing press for money, something Gutenberg never imagined.
Leasing
a popular Bible to denominations means even more money from that edition, which
can be withdrawn – as the older NIV was – and replaced with a new one, as the
2011 NIV was. The denomination can no longer use the older version of the Bible,
so their own educational books must be replaced, reprinted, resold. Disdaining
the KJV Bible made it possible to sell RSV Bibles to the liberal denominations
in the 1950s and NIV translations to the more conservative groups later. The KJV
Bible copies became war surplus and piled up in dark cupboards of churches and
homes.
Eugene
Nida had a major impact on this unified transition to new Bibles. His advantage
was not being tied to one translation by supervising and influencing many at
once, through the American Bible Society. These changes were happening in the Biblical
text market as well, through Wescott Hort earlier, then Nestle, finally Nestle
Aland. The scattered were gathered together into a unified group that replaced
the KJV Majority Text and the King James Version itself.
One
major step in upgrading the SIL Wycliffee effort was moving to a college campus
in Oklahoma. Nida’s membership in the American Bible Society was also upgraded –
to a membership in the United Bible Societies, formed in 1946. Few people today
know what kind of praise Nida earned for his work –
“Nida
has made the one greatest contribution to Bible translation of recent
times....” Pike added that Nida had “taken over literal word-for-word
translation and …smashed it.”[1]
However, in 1953, SIL
Wycliffe demanded translators agree to the original manuscripts being free from
all error, and Nida resigned from both entities because of difficulties in
presenting a missionary translation effort to donors. More likely, the SIL
Wycliffee leadership was not going along with Nida’s bold creativity.
Although people claim today that PhDs are a dime a dozen,
that is hardly true. A scan of one university faculty list showed that about
25% had PhDs. The rest had a master’s degree or two. However, shortly after
World War II, an individual with a PhD was especially rare and enjoyed
mobility, status, and various rewards. Nida was already prominent, so he was an
easy target for Roman Catholic scholars in 1953. For Chinese work, Nida saw the
long-term potential of dropping the KJV tradition and partnering with the Roman
Catholics who came to him. Bible societies printed Catholic Bibles separate
from Protestant Bibles, but this move promised a union of Catholic and
Protestant texts and Bibles. Nida did not like the Traditional Text or the
English Revision of the KJV. They could unify the effort with Catholics, as
Nida wrote -
It
became evident that only jointly produced texts of the Greek New Testament and
the Hebrew Bible could form the basis for broad collaboration in translating.
But working out the implications of this would take a number of years.[2]
Protestant academics
helped this Protestant-Catholic union along by sniffing that our Bibles did not
contain the Apocrypha, books which were never accepted as belonging to the
Canon. Excitement waned and vanished as college students learned how dull the
Apocrypha was.[3]
The Roman Catholic Experience
Simply put, the ultimate and final authority for a Roman
Catholic is the Pope, while that authority for a faithful Protestant is the
Scriptures. People try to claim that Lutherans are not Evangelicals or
Protestants, but both terms come directly from the Lutheran Reformation. Luther
called those who followed the Gospel – “Evangelicals”. When the Evangelicals offered their truthful
testimony to the Roman Catholics at Speyer, they called it a “positive witness”,
the real meaning of Protestant. The only weapon for a Protestant Evangelical is
the Word of God.
It
need hardly be said, that Papal infallibility is alike unscriptural and
unfounded. Not to mention, that one Pope has again and again directly
contradicted another Pope in matters of faith, and that, too, when speaking ex
cathedra, their attempts to determine what is Scripture, have presented
their pretensions in this respect in the most ridiculous point of view. If
Papal infallibility was necessary in any case, it was surely most necessary to
give a correct and authentic copy of the Scriptures; but here they have failed
most egregiously. “Of all literary blunders,” says D’Israeli, in his Curiosities
of Literature, “none equaled that of the Vulgate, by Sixtus V.[^BA] His
Holiness carefully superintended every sheet as it passed through the press;
and to the amazement of the world, the work remained without a rival, — it swarmed
with errata! A multitude of scraps were printed to paste over the
erroneous passages, in order to give the true text. The book makes a whimsical
appearance with these patches, and the heretics exulted in this demonstration
of papal infallibility! The copies were called in, and violent attempts made to
suppress it; a few, however, still remain for the raptures of the Biblical
collectors. Not long ago, the Bible of Sixtus V. fetched above sixty guineas, —
not too much for a mere book of blunders!” This Bible of Pope Sixtus had a bull
prefixed to the first volume, in which the editorial Pontiff, “of his certain
knowledge, and fullness of apostolical power,” decreed that “this was to be
held as the only authentic edition of the Vulgate,” forbidding in all time
coming the publication of any edition that should vary in any respect from his,
under the penalty of incurring “The wrath of Almighty God, and his blessed
apostles, Peter and Paul.” This was a sufficiently formidable anathema;
nevertheless, Pope Clement VIII., who was not less infallible than his
predecessor, only two years afterwards, published a new edition, differing from
that of Sixtus, in no fewer than 2000 passages![4]
[1] Ken
Pike, “Report of the General Director’s Appointee on Linguistic Matters”, SIL
board of directors, minutes, appendix I, 12-18 September, 1949, p. 8 (WBT-SIL
Corporate Archives). Cited in Why They Changed the Bible, p. 61.
[2] Nida,
Fascinated by Languages (2003), p. 40. Cited in Why They Changed the
Bible, p. 66.
[3] Some
of us children in Moline found a Catholic Bible in an attic and told a mother
or two about the strange names of new books in the Bible.
[4] Hislop, Alexander. The Light of Prophecy
Let in on the dark places of the Papacy. Being an exposition of 2 Thessalonians
2:3-12 Showing its exact fulfillment in the Church of Rome, with special
reference to the aspect of that Church in the present day.
