CHONGQING — Well, not literally, but pretty close. Via DailyKos, I learned today that Conservapedia (the Bizarro version of Wikipedia) intends to take the King James Bible and rewrite it into plain modern English, making sure the new version has no “liberal bias.”
The Conservative Bible will be a wiki, so it will be a group project, rather like giving a large group of monkeys enough time and equipment to recreate the works of William Shakespeare.
The rationale and methodology of this ill-conceived project piece of crap are so wrong on so many levels that’s it’s hard to know where to begin.
The King James Version (1611) was an English translation from the Hebrew, Latin and Greek texts then available, done entirely by members of the Church of England. It became the “standard Bible” among English-speaking Protestants, largely because of its poetic language and of the breadth of the British Empire.
Conservapedia’s head simians plan to retranslate the English in the KJV translation, which is a lot like playing “Telephone” with the Scriptures. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
There’s nothing wrong with retranslating the Bible. It’s been done dozens of times already. But the new versions start from the original texts, not the KJV. For example, the New International Version (which apparently is too liberal for the monkeys at Conservapedia) was a joint project of 100 scholars in several different countries and different churches, who referred to texts and archaelogical evidence that were unknown 400 years ago. The complete NIV Bible came out in 1978.
Recent Comments