Conservative Bible?

Apparently a gang of zanies at Conservapedia (a toxic waste dump of right-wing, wing-nut, ultra-right, fringe-right, and to-the-right-of-fascism "conservatives") want to "translate" the Bible into conservative-friendly text because, they claim, too many translated Bible passages sound "liberal." Evidently not only "liberal" translations irk these nuts; they view askance passages like "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" in Luke (maybe it's not "authentic" but was inserted by some ancient liberal).

Conservative Bible? Liberal Bible? The Bible used to be God's word. Did he sell the copyright to somebody? Soon it will be the Republican Bible belonging to the Republican National Committee (RNC). Perhaps the "conservative Bible" will revise the opening of John's gospel to read "In the beginning was the RNC, and the RNC was with God, and what God was the RNC was..."

If you follow the link in the post below to the article on Conservapedia and read it, you quickly understand what these crack-pots are up to. They care not an atom about the actual text of the Bible or scholarship. They merely want to paraphrase (not "translate") the text and thus change it into a version replete with modern politically loaded terms wherever they want to insert them. The aim, in short, is to turn the Bible into a propaganda device for a particularly obnoxious American political faction. And given the present state of the know-nothing Christian right, they'll succeed. They have plenty of precedent. Millions have read at least part of the "Living Bible," another paraphrase from a generation ago, and thought that they were getting the real stuff when all they were getting was one man's distortion of the text mixed with a huge amount of unspoken theological biases and hidden agendas.

The alternative, of course, is to devote years to learning ancient Greek and Hebrew, studying ancient history, mastering the history of Bible textual criticism, and learning about the principles and practice of honest, scholarly translation. Who's gonna do that these days? So look for the "Conservative Bible" in a Christian bookstore near you soon.

Read about it here