God’s Big Nose, TNIV, and Gender-Inclusive Bibles
On his Facebook page, Eddy linked to an AP story about Biblica updating the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible and publishing it in 2011. At that time, Zondervan will also cease publishing the Today’s New International Version (TNIV) that came out in 2005. (Biblica owns the copyright on both versions and Zondervan publishes them in North America.) The TNIV sought to update some of the phrasing in the NIV to reflect changes in the English language. But it was controversial because while Zondervan would continue publishing the NIV, the Committee on Bible Translation that produced both versions would no longer update the NIV and the TNIV would become its primary focus for further revisions. The issue with the TNIV is that it uses gender-inclusive language. For example, “sons of God,” is now translated, “children of God.” Apparently some people were unhappy with the TNIV’s process and wanted more transparency even though Christianity Today devoted a cover story to the TNIV and the debate surrounding it and a whole book was published regarding the gender-neutral controversy.
I’d like to respond a bit to the criticism of the TNIV cited in the AP story. Regarding the changes in the TNIV,
Many prominent pastors and scholars endorsed the changes. But critics said masculine terms in the original should not be tampered with. Some warned that changing singular gender references to plural ones alters what the Bible says about God’s relationships with individuals.
The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution saying the edition “has gone beyond acceptable translation standards.”
I’m curious as to what singular gender references they have in mind that have been changed so as to alter God’s relationships with individuals. In the modern English-speaking world, we don’t really have a problem with emphasizing the relationships between God and individuals. If anything, we read the Bible too individualistically, with too much of an emphasis on the individual that we run the risk of misinterpreting the texts. Granted, our language does not help us. Both Greek and Hebrew have a plural form of the second person pronoun—a “plural you,” as it were—and those pronouns are found throughout the Bible. English does not have a second person plural pronoun and so we have often read the Bible saying, “you,” as if it is speaking to the individual rather than the community. In my opinion, translating the Bible in ways that reflect the communal nature of the texts needs to be one of the primary responsibilities of translators.
I support careful gender-inclusive language in our translations and have no real issues with the TNIV. And as far as gender-inclusive translations go, the TNIV is fairly conservative in its changes. I grew up on the NIV and I think it is a fine translation. I first began using a gender-inclusive translation (the NRSV) in college when I wrote religious studies papers—the NRSV is widely accepted in academic circles. I initially liked the NRSV on a purely aesthetic level and began using it as my primary version for devotional reading. I couldn’t read Greek or Hebrew at the time, so I had no way of deciding if the NRSV was a more faithful translation or not. I still use the NRSV as my primary Bible and find it a very reliable version.
As I have studied Greek and Hebrew, I have come to appreciate gender-inclusive translations not for some politically correct reasons, but for much of the same reasons I choose to read modern biblical translations instead of the King James Version (KJV). The KJV was a fine translation for its time, reflecting the way people spoke and wrote in the 17th Century. English has changed over the centuries. We do not speak or write today as people did in the 1600’s. We do not even spell many of the same words in the same way as they did in the past. The Greek and Hebrew of the Bible have not changed—though we continue to find and use older and older manuscripts to translate—our contemporary English has changed.
The Bible was written in the earthy languages of real people who used those languages for everything in their lives: worship, conversation, trade, poetry, history, etc. Like any language, the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek of the Bible were full of idiomatic phrases. When Paul wrote to his “brothers” to address the churches in his letters, no biblical scholar would say that he was only writing to men. “Brothers” was an idiom that represented the community. “Brothers,” “man,” and “men” used to be gender-inclusive terms in English, but that has changed. So I see nothing wrong with carefully translating an idiomatic phrase in a way that reflects its meaning. I make it a practice to render “brothers” as “brothers and sisters” in my own translations when it is clear that the text is addressing more than just the men of the group. This translation reflects the way we speak and write now. I do not believe that it does violence or changes the meaning of the original texts. The historical nature of the manuscripts and the ever-evolving nature of language creates a problem for translators, especially translators of Scripture. We believe that God speaks to us through the Bible and so we need the Bible to be readable. At the same time, these are historical documents written at specific times and places and we can run the risk of trying to update them. Care must be taken and I believe that the translators of the TNIV were careful.
Even the most wooden, word for word translations of the Bible are not 100% accurate. That is not merely a statement regarding grammar since word order is different and different languages often have different verb tenses. Some translation of idioms and thoughts are required to make sense to us today. Did you know that the Bible says God has a big nose? We often render the term ‘arek ‘apim, as “slow to anger” or “longsuffering,” to describe God’s divine and gracious patience. “The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.” (Psalm 103.8) When translated woodenly, the term is actually “long of nose.” It’s a Hebrew idiom and makes no sense in English without translating the actual thought.
For what it is worth, I think a very wooden, very word-for-word translation of the Bible into English would be of great help to students who do not read Greek or Hebrew. It would be wonderful for the average Bible reader to be able to see how earthy some of the original idioms are and how strange they can sound to our ears. Can you imagine giving someone a complement by telling them they have a big nose?
I am skeptical that the primary reason for the cessation of the TNIV is the mea culpa from Biblica and the NIV’s handlers with regard to how the revision process took place. While Biblica is a non-profit organization, Zondervan is a subsidiary of NewsCorp, a publicly traded company. My assumption is that the TNIV just isn’t selling like they hoped it would. When the Southern Baptist Convention denounced the TNIV, they also announced that they would not sell the version in their stores. If the TNIV were more profitable, Biblica may have re-opened revision on the NIV, but I doubt Zondervan would have shut down publishing the TNIV.
I think that some criticisms of the TNIV were legitimate. When the singular Greek “pater” was translated “parent” rather than “father,” it took something away from the text (it was changed back to “father” in the ‘05 edition).
I also think there’s a difference between the “brothers” idiom and the “big nose” idiom. I don’t think that most people are smart enough to know that “big nose” is a Hebrew idiom for “slow to anger.” I do think that most people are smart enough to know that “brothers” and “man” can be inclusive terms. When the “big nose” idiom is translated as “slow to anger,” it gives the reader something he wouldn’t be able to figure out on his own. But when the “brothers” idiom is translated as “brothers and sisters,” I think it makes the reader a passive recipient of meaning rather than an active discoverer of it. Ironically, it is the interpreter who insists that “brothers” always refers to men who is being the most literalist. Monty Python is instructive:
“Obviously, [blessed are the cheesemakers] is not meant to be taken literally: it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.”
“Blessed are the big-noses.”
Comment by Timbo — September 3, 2009 @ 7:24 am
Yes, people might be able to figure out that brothers refers to men and women alike, but the semantic domain of adelphoi doesn’t exclude women, so why should our English translations? Why should the reader have to figure that out?
Comment by Chase — September 3, 2009 @ 3:59 pm
“Yes, people might be able to figure out that brothers refers to men and women alike, but the semantic domain of adelphoi doesn’t exclude women, so why should our English translations?”
They don’t exclude women.
Comment by Timbo — September 3, 2009 @ 5:44 pm
When was the last time you used the word brother to refer to a woman? Perhaps you and I speak different dialects, but brother is an exclusively male term. “Brothers and sisters” is the phrase that most correctly corresponds to the meaning of adelphoi as used in the early church and the NT.
Comment by Chase — September 3, 2009 @ 5:54 pm
I have never used the word brother to refer to a woman. I have, though, used the word “guys” to address a group of people that consisted of both men and women. The women never thought I was excluding them from my greeting. The only way I could have excluded them would have been to say “Hey guys” and then said that I had not included the women in my greeting. Similarly, when the NIV, for example, translates James as saying “Consider it pure joy, my brothers…”, I don’t know of anyone who took that as James saying “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, but not my sisters….” If it had said that, then it would have excluded women. That it doesn’t say that means that it does not exclude women.
You are, of course, free to prefer “brothers and sisters” and translations which use that phrase. You don’t, however, demand that the translations render it “brothers and sisters and white people,” nor do you think that the phrase “brothers and sisters” excludes white people. Why then does “brothers” in the NIV or any other modern translation that doesn’t explicitly add “sisters” exclude women? The reason is that the inclusivity is implied by the context of what is being said. Note my point. I’m not questioning the propriety of using “brothers and sisters” even though for reasons stated I think it leads to passivism. What I’m questioning is the notion that using the word “brothers” without adding “sisters” amounts to something that’s excluding women.
Comment by Timbo — September 3, 2009 @ 6:56 pm
I mean excluding in the literal sense—translating adelphoi as “brothers” is inaccurate since the early church usage of the word includes women. It would be like translating Chaucer’s “coerl” as “churl” instead of “man”; the range of meaning is greater in the social context than in the family context.
Comment by Chase — September 3, 2009 @ 8:29 pm
I’m finally responding a bit later than I wanted, so if I take the discussion off the direction you two were in, forgive me.
Timbo, could you fill out how using “brothers and sisters” makes the reader passive?
For what it’s worth, I don’t think intelligence plays into whether people can understand idioms. I think it is more a matter of the similarities of cultures. The reason many have been able to understand “brothers” in our English Bibles to be gender-inclusive is that for the majority of the history of English, the idiom “brothers” was gender-inclusive, much like in Koine Greek. The languages, the cultures were similar on this point. English has become more gender-specified in recent decades so that “brothers” in English is (becoming?) no longer gender-inclusive.
Comment by Tyler Watson — September 3, 2009 @ 8:54 pm
Sorry to belabor the point, but I think “guys” is a great example of why “adelphoi” should be translated “brothers and sisters.” If I were charged with translating “hey guys” into Spanish, I would never consider using the word “hombre” or anything exclusively male to convey the meaning. Similarly, when an NT writer uses “adelphoi” to address or refer to men and women, it would be translated inclusively.
Comment by Chase — September 3, 2009 @ 9:12 pm
Chase writes: “Similarly, when an NT writer uses “adelphoi” to address or refer to men and women, it would be translated inclusively.”
Tyler writes: “The reason many have been able to understand “brothers” in our English Bibles to be gender-inclusive is that for the majority of the history of English, the idiom “brothers” was gender-inclusive, much like in Koine Greek.”
Tyler, you made my point for me. The idiom “brothers” has been gender-inclusive, which Chase denies. Consider my position to be a push-back against the needless alteration of the English idiom, which I see as inclusive.
As for making the reader passive, my concern is less with using “brothers and sisters” in place of “brothers” than it is with changing “Father” to parent when talking about God. I won’t have time to fill this out until later, but I think that rather than transforming the words of Scripture, we should be renewing our minds. To use a different example, instead of changing “Stephen was stoned” to avoid making junior high kids laugh, I think we should try to explain the concept of “stoning” to them.
I’ll have time to fill this out next week.
Comment by Timbo — September 3, 2009 @ 10:32 pm
Well there’s the difference: I’m not a prescriptivist.
Translation inherently changes a text. The goal should be to change the meaning as little as possible in the ears of the hearer, not to adhere to some aesthetic ideal or (worse) external theology.
Comment by Chase — September 4, 2009 @ 5:09 am
“The goal should be to change the meaning as little as possible in the ears of the hearer.”
Agreed. I think this can be done in different ways. We can either completely accomodate the hearer, so that if because of a poor childhood they hear a negative idea in the term “Father” we remove the offensive term and substitute a generic “parent.” Or, we can redeem the idea of “Father” so that when a person who has had a poor childhood hears “Father,” they have an idea of something bigger than their own frame of reference. I’ve seen these two approaches play out in real life. The person who thinks the text should be accomodated has never been able to overcome their own frame of reference and is stuck with a negative idea of God as a Father. The person who redeemed the idea of “Father” by actively altering what they hear in the term has been able to overcome a great deal. I see this play out in my own struggle with certain portions of Scripture. Either I accomodate the ideas to my own understanding, or I look for something bigger than myself in those ideas. This is not to say that no move should be made in the direction of the hearer, just that the hearer should lean not on their own understanding, but be transformed by the renewing of their mind, that they might see and hear things in new and redemptive ways.
Comment by Timbo — September 4, 2009 @ 6:54 am
One may not like the changes in the English language and try to keep the language from changing, which is fine. I just don’t know if the Bible is the appropriate setting for the debate. For better or worse, English has changed and is changing with regard to gender-talk and I think Chase puts his finger on it that translation should change the text as little as possible in the ears of the hearer.
I can’t remember the camp song, but I remember there was a line in which we sang something like, “to make us his sons,” and the women would shout after, “and daughters!” The “and daughters” wasn’t in the lyrics, but clearly to the ears of many of the women there, “sons” was not a gender-inclusive term even though I believe the song was quoting Scripture and likely intended the word to be inclusive of women.
Take, for another example, the Greek word, agape. Translators and exegetes have always known that this word for love receives special attention in the NT. Old English translations often used the word, “charity” for agape to capture the gracious and unconditional nature of that kind of love and to set it apart from the other types in the Greek. “Charity” has its roots in the Greek word charis, which we translate, “grace.” But charity in English has changed to mean something akin to gifts given to the needy or an organization that helps the needy. Now we say, “I don’t need your charity,” when it would be absurd to say, “I don’t need your love.” All this despite the fact that in the past, love and charity were synonyms. Charity’s definition in English has narrowed rather than retained its expansiveness. So instead of translating it, “faith, hope, and charity,” we now use, “faith, hope, and love.” It would be more confusing to keep “charity” in our modern translations even though, if we were to study the historically broad meanings of that term, we could see that charity was (and is?) a perfectly good word for agape. But I am less concerned with studying English than the Greek and Hebrew when performing exegesis.
This is a tricky issue. Translation always is, since, as Chase pointed out, translation always changes the text. Because I have to study and translate the original text on a regular basis, I feel the tension between honoring the original text and its setting and honoring the congregation to whom I preach and their setting. I have to make choices all the time. I have to ask myself when something doesn’t make as much sense to our ears, “Is this a place where I need to bring the text closer to the congregation or the congregation closer to the text?” The matter of Father that you mention is one where I think it may be better to bring the congregation closer to the text. The matter of the size of God’s nose is one where I think I can bring the text closer to the congregation.
As I said in my post, we’re in a tight spot with Scripture—does one treat it merely as an historical document, like a text from Josephus? If so, translate it as woodenly as possible. Don’t translate the idioms so that they read easier to us. Get as close to word for word as you can. Or does one treat the Bible merely as something that speaks to audiences today? Then translate it as colloquially as possible, like The Message. The Bible lies somewhere in between.
I do know that Islam has decided to avoid the problem of translation by using only the Arabic text of the Koran in its services and for devotional reading. Their choice was also theological, but that faith has avoided the practical issue we face.
Comment by Tyler Watson — September 4, 2009 @ 10:34 am